So that Idea I had two days ago mostly hinged on alternating the reptilian bits with the insectile bits, and it’s coming along pretty well:
Click to Enlarge. There’s a fair bit of detail in there.
Since the wings made more sense to me as insect wings, the arms needed to change from chitinous limbs (the hands of which were bothering me anyhow) to scaly, clawed arms. Somehow the whole lower half stayed insectile, though I don’t really think that that’s a bad thing. The head shape as well as the character of the draconic eye has kind of gotten away from me; I’m still figuring that out again, it seems.
I need to go re-read the agreement I have with Hero Games about some artwork I did, because now I want to show you something similar I did a few years back; it was a Spider Dragon for (appropriately enough) The Book of Dragons, and I played with a mix of compound/dragon eyes there.
Anyhow, you might have noticed that the teeth have “regressed” to something more resembling the original; while working on this and comparing it to what I’ve been doing recently, I realized that I had been “shorthanding” the jawful of razors that The Interloper is supposed to have by replacing them with only a few long incisors, and as I had kept drawing it over and over, it became more and more simplified, which is a natural response from a “draw this character 100 times and figure out what works/what doesn’t” perspective.
That is to say that the subconscious tooth redesign worked, but it wasn’t as “gut-level terrifying” as I first had in mind when I set off down this path. Moreso than other dragons that have been born here, The Interloper is very much “teeth and eyes.“
The maxillae will probably end up being even more thumblike; otherwise (like the dragon linked above) the dragon can’t really bite or chew, aside from striking with its face like a snake. Either that, or we’ll just go back to the first version, with the smaller, but very, very toothy lower jaw, because the head is actually getting a little crowded with all the teeth and articulation anyway…
Oh I very much like the arms!
With the teeth– I think i said this before, but why not make them all individually motile? Like Nausicaa’s God Warrior’s teeth?