Dragon Tamer: Still a WIP

I imagine sometimes that this stage of painting is not unlike being pregnant.  The vision of the final is so close to being real, but there's still so much time to put in before you see it.

Meanwhile you just feel fat and irritable.  Those of you out there who have been pregnant, let me know.

I did a study over a photo of the Dragon Tamer piece and it was . . . not a pretty sight.  So after aimlessly perusing the internet for "photo night scene" and "moonlit person", trying to remember the name of night paintings I'd seen or come across, and countless other queries, I hit the books.

Which is honestly what I should have done in the first place; I own a copy of "Color and Light" as well as "Imaginative Realism" by James Gurney, after all.  My obsession with books can get me into trouble sometimes; I have so many that I forget or get overwhelmed by too much information.

If I hadn't been so busy looking and reading I would have kicked myself - all the paintings, all the information was there.  At the very least I had a new direction to try and take the color studies.

And as you can see below, take them places I did.

Glowy dragon needs to not make a reappearance. 

Meanwhile I was also working on the final sketches for the Save the Dates.  Simple, I kept telling myself, beautiful color, strong shapes, concentrate on the feeling.

I can't help but think that simple really just means LOTS of work, but maybe I'm doing something wrong . . .

Last year when I went to Tennessee, I went to Cades Cove (possibly one of my favorite places on earth).  We got there before the gates opened and were able to drive through just as the sun was coming up over the mountains.  There was fog and fall trees and deer and it was amazingly beautiful. So when I started working on this piece, that morning is what I was thinking about.

The first one . . . wasn't awesome.  At the very least it didn't get me excited to start the piece.  It didn't recall any of the beauty, any of the feeling I was trying to capture.  There were things I liked, but overall it was just boring.  So I did another one.  It was better, but my struggles with Dragon Tamer have shaken my confidence, so I kept at it, trying to find something that really worked.

I looked up some morning fog, looked up paintings of fog (oh, hello Turner, hello Whistler), trying to just steep myself in the essence of what I was trying to create.

So I made, like, a million color comps.  And then just quit and broke out the watercolor paper and started doing it old school.  I didn't have much more success.

So here's where I am with Dragon Tamer:

Wait, aren't those color comps, you say? Why yes, yes they are . . .

Because this is where it is in real life.  Still.  I still can't seem to find the key.  I've been taking it into my room at night, hoping that by looking at it before I fall asleep, I'll be able to work out the problem in my sleep.

It hasn't worked.

And here's where I am with the Save the Dates:

Color comps everywhere!

Fog doesn't usually drift like this, I am discovering . . . 

I haven't done so many color comps since I was a sophomore in college.  Little Red Cap tricked me with how very easily the steam effect was created and I dived into the color comps here thinking "Fog is like steam, I got this!"

WRONG.

Fog is not like steam.  Especially fog that has light coming through it.  And I can't seem to make up my mind as to what this is going to look like - realistic?  Stylized?  And I'm worried about this nagging voice that's telling me to go make maquettes for the owls so I can light them (shut UP!) correctly.

Both of these were supposed to be DONE by now.  I have a schedule!  Save the Dates were supposed to be a mash up of watercolor-y effects goodness.  In-and-out, easy-peasy.

Freaking owls.  Freaking fog.  Freaking DRAGONS.  Do your worst, you won't win . . .

Working on something for Ten Paces and Draw: check back February 18th to see the final reveal.

Holy crows, I really am a masochist . . .

Dragon Tamer: WIP

Just in case someone out there is wondering what "WIP" means - it stands for "Work In Progress".

Moving along, slowly but surely.  This piece has become infinitely more intricate and complicated than I originally anticipated.  I'm about 22 hours in on the final, way off schedule (I'm supposed to be working on my sister's save the dates, shhhh), and I am now stuck and having to lean heavily on Photoshop to solve some of the color problems I am having.

I had intended to have the final done by next week's post, but I doubt that is going to happen.  So look forward instead to another update on this as well as an update on the Save the Date illustration I will be working on.

It's going to be awesome when it's finished, though!

The sketch for the Save the Date.

Dragon Tamer

This is a rough summary of the story that was inspired by the Dragon Tamer piece.  I debated for a while even putting up this much, but I wanted people to have an idea of what was going on.  

I hope this gives you a good idea of what I was thinking when I thought of this piece.  There may or may not be a book in the works, and I reserve the right to take everything back to the drawing board.  I'd love to hear what you think, so please feel free to leave a comment.


Please don't steal anything.

Once upon a time, but not very long ago, there lived a boy named Gabriel Predergast. He lived somewhere between this world and Fairie, so as you can imagine, some wonderful and fantastic things have happened to him. But it wasn’t always like that. For a long time - 17 years in fact - nothing amazing had happened to Gabriel except that he was the one wizard in a family of wizards who couldn’t do magic. Magic never did what he wanted it to do. He was very good at building things, however. But in a world where magic is the rule rather than the exception, “handmade” is rather less than ordinary. For years he despaired of ever doing anything important or great or even interesting until one day his family went to a party. 

Gabriel and his whole family were invited - his father and mother, his seven older brothers and three younger sisters (who were all fantastic wizards, which made Gabriel’s failed attempts look even worse). Now, lots of things happened at this party – most important being that there was a real, honest to goodness dragon in a cage. A dragon that Gabriel and Jason, one of his older brothers, stole.

It was, of course, Jason’s idea, but he ended up dragging Gabriel into his hair-brained scheme (it happened a lot). Through a series of events too complicated to get into now, they ended up sneaking the dragon out that very night and no one was the wiser. Gabriel and Jason managed to ‘borrow’ their father’s car, stuff themselves and the dragon inside and drive out past the city limits. It’s a good thing it was late and there was no one on the road; neither of them had a license and Jason had never managed to pass any of his multiple driving courses. They stopped at the first secluded spot they found and let the dragon out of the car with firm notice that it was to ‘go back to its home’ and, this from Gabriel who was a little bit smarter than his brother as you might have guessed, that it wasn’t under any circumstance to follow them home. But you never know with dragons what they understand and what they don’t. Or at the very least what they choose to listen to. 

Gabriel and his brother made it back to the party in one piece - sans dragon.  What is more important is that their father’s car made it back in one piece, which could be considered a minor miracle. Everything went according to plan - at least until the morning. 

The dragon took a liking to Gabriel and ended up following them home.  You can imagine the chaos that ensued as Gabriel and his brother tried to hide the dragon from the rest of their family – but no matter how they pleaded threatened or cajoled, the dragon would not leave.

They hid it in the basement. No one went down there much and they might have hidden it pretty well, if the dragon could have been persuaded to stay there. Jason’s skills were sorely put to the test finding and fixing the myriad of things the dragon broke on its wanderings through the house. He didn’t find all of them in time either - Mrs. Predergast’s china and china cabinet fought the dragon and were cast down rather spectacularly. And loudly. Gabriel ended up shouldering the blame for that - even though Jason fixed everything ‘good as new’ for his mother - and was grounded for a week. By this time, the “theft” of the dragon was headline news and Mr. Prendergast was heavily involved in the investigation casting more than one suspicious glance at his sons. To Gabriel’s credit, he thought all eight of his sons were in some way responsible, and by the end of two weeks, all eleven of his children knew and were actively involved in trying to keep the dragon hidden. The triplets of course were first, being the most in the house, but the other six boys weren’t far behind.

Now, the really remarkable thing was that the dragon – the wild, untamable, fire-breathing dragon – followed Gabriel around like a puppy (or at least it tried).  Both brothers were at a loss to understand what was going on, until Jason came across an old book on dragons. It talked about a very rare kind of person that dragons were attracted to - any dragon, whether it be old or young, from near or far, ferocious or gentle, would be docile and calm and good natured when confronted by a dragon tamer. 

Gabriel had lived all his life without magic, without anything that really set him apart from the rest of his siblings, or even brought him up to their level. But being a dragon tamer didn’t sound like all that great a consolation prize. What good is it to be able to charm dragons with your mere presence in a world where dragons were all but extinct? And that didn’t help them with their immediate problem which was that they couldn’t get the thing to leave. He didn’t care about the dragon, he didn’t care about being a dragon tamer – he just wanted the dragon gone. 
Unfortunately the dragon belonged to a very powerful wizard who wasn’t about to sit back and just let a bunch of kids steal his dragon. Obviously.

Now a lot of other things happen before Gabriel gets to the  point you see developing in the illustration above.  One important thing is that Jason and Gabriel find a flute that allows a dragon tamer to control a dragon.  More things get stolen, feelings are hurt, the dragon gets kidnapped and in the process of rescuing him (and with no small degree of anger) Gabriel ends up doing a lot of stupid things - including setting a house on fire.  But while things don't end perfectly  lessons are learned and Gabriel takes a step towards understanding and accepting himself for who he is and who he is not.

I will update this again when things are a little more settled story-wise.

Drawing Dragons

On the off chance that this might be useful to someone, or for myself to look back on later: here is how "Drogo" came to life.

Anytime I try and do something in art that I haven't done before, I look to the masters.  Fortunately there are several Dragon Masters and they all tend to congregate over at Muddy Colors blog.  What's even more helpful is when all said Dragon Masters congregate to talk dragons over a two week period - which they did last September.  And piz-de-resistance: Justin Gerard's fantastic post on filling the storehouses in your brain with reference info from real life which you can read here, as well as some other tips on using real life to inspire fantastic illustrations here.

So I pulled up a whole mess of reference and dived in - and almost immediately got lost.

But I discovered two very important things: one being that I don't like drawing reptiles.  At all.  And two, Gerard knows his business and should always be heeded lest brain sucking aliens who feed on the unwary and under-researched find you and . . . well, eat your brains.

What I'm trying to say is that despite my distaste for two-dimensional reptile reproduction, I learned a lot.  And I know my dragons are better for it.

I sat myself down and drew a bunch of lizards and crocodiles and eels.  That was more frustrating than I anticipated and might have added to my general dislike of the species.  I leaned a bit too heavily on my reference and the first few came out too . . . crocodile-ish.

I kept at it, hated everything, and finally just put all the reference away, listening to Gerard's advice despite my doubts of being able to pull something like this off without guidelines.  Then I put in too much turtle - which was odd because I hadn't been looking at any turtle reference.  Then because owls are always on the brain, they decided to jump in at one point and I had to call everyone to order.  But by then, my youngest sister had tossed in some seahorses and that yanked all of us down a completely new path.  Out of nowhere, some real horses joined up with a komodo dragon or two and by that point I really had no idea where we were going and was just along for the ride.

After I had the rough idea of what to sculpt (the word sculpt being used here in a very general rough vague sort of way) I attempted several times to start . . . and restart.  And restart.  Then I brought out the tin foil and everything started working a little better.  A not to those who are masochistic enough to try this in the future: armatures make Sculpey much more bearable.  And usable.  

I did the head separate because it was a nightmare trying to shape it while it was on the body.  And it kept coming out looking like the lizard from Rescuers Down Under.  No joke.  

Finally I cooked the darn thing and hung it up between two chairs to photograph.

The problem that I ran into after that is I tend to lean too heavily on my reference and the lack of detail 1. was making my drawing look half-assed and 2. was good because it made me see that about myself.

So.  A general outline of how I made the little dragon guy.  Hopefully some pitfalls identified to avoid in the future.  

Owl + Goldfish = Dragon?

Here's what I am (still) working on.  Dragons, dragons and more dragons.  I was looking at snakes, eels, alligators and lizards for reference, but I have since moved on to owls, seahorses, horses and turtles, and I'm not quite sure what else.  Maybe goldfish.  But it's good prep for my next super secret project (already in the works, I've started the 'required reading' and stuff).  You wont see much of the process for a while; it's a surprise gift for someone and I'm not sure how often they check up on me here.  But Dragon Tamer gets done first, and as you can see, the prep-work has been much more substantial than I anticipated (as well as holiday festivities throwing off my groove).  I've still got a maquette in progress.  And the rest of the plot outline to write.  And the painting to finish.  By the eighteenth. Oh, dear . . . 

Happy New Year!

"Gabriel was not very good at magic.  His parents told him and their friends that he was only "struggling a little".  His older brothers were more blunt (they usually were) and said that there hadn't been a Prendergast so uniformly bad at magic for ten generations."

Next piece in the works.  This is just a sketch - no his arms are not deformed, I just drew them poorly.

Stay tuned for a story summary!