Dragon-A-Day Online: Day 341

So I got a bunch of books from the library this week; a bunch of books about painitng.

It’s kind of annoying, actually; the one book I was really excited about, Fantasy Creatures by ImagineFX is more of a list of not-quite-tutorials and seemingly random tips than a how-to, and a lot of it takes the reader’s knowledge for granted. I also started reading James’ Gurney’s Imaginative Realism, which looks promising, though at the get-go it explains that it’s not so much about the painting process as it is about learning to see things in the real world and applying that understanding to things you make up.

Anyhoo, the point of my saying that is that in both of them (and probably others in the pile of books I brought home), there are a number of tips and pointers for overall improvement. One that I noticed basically boils down to “do something that you’re not used to.”

With that in mind this evening, I thought about what I usually do and tried to come up with something different:

Dragon Characteristics:

-4 limbs, sometimes wings.
-scales, plates, or plates + scales.
– horns or other head decoration.
-3-5 clawed toes, sometimes 1 opposable [digit]
-cat- or lizard-like bearing (exceptions exist)
-wedge-shaped head.

So I kind of ended up drawing a naked ostrich. At the same time, though, this harkens back to the question that I’ve been asking myself over and over again for the last year and a half or so: is something a dragon because I tell you that it is, or because it has some sort of indefinable… dragon-ness about it?

To further illustrate using examples that came off the top of my head:

Dragon. According to its continuity, anyway.

Not a dragon.
Also, according to its continuity.
And, just to make matters that much more complicated:

Dragon. According to the continuity that supports the previous two examples.
Although, to be fair, Dratini (the first example) turns into this eventually…

So I don’t know. I don’t think that this will ever be solved, or at least that I’ll ever be truly satisfied with the result. But I did something different, and it made me think, so that’s probably the most important thing.