I’ve been really tired most of this week, and this weekend, while loads of fun, has been even more tiring. I almost gave up tonight.
Almost.
This is Zucadragon, the latest in my queue from draconity.org. This was another set of visual references, with two very different images and no description.
While working on this, I came to understand a few things:
One thing that I’ve realized as I work on these is that I rarely have any notion of what to do with the dragons that I’ve been given to depict; and that’s been making some of these a lot harder than they ought to be. Although I’ve asked for descriptions of the demeanor/personality of the dragons, I’ve gotten very few, instead getting many useful details of physicality, which is fine- it’s just that when I’m trying to work on it, I draw blanks, and have to “feel it out.”
For this one in particular, I skimmed some of Zucadragon’s posts on the forum, and made a (very) quick assessment of their tone. From what I got was that this was a dragon that would be hard to impress, and I ran with it.
The other is that visual references are great, but at the same time, my mind tends to gloss over them. In the references for this dragon, it seems that most of the dorsal spikes overlap, forming a sort of ridge. But, not ALL of them do. The first five or so times I looked at it, Even when I was asking for some clarifications about other inconsistencies between the references, I didn’t notice this at all. Only when I was dead tired working on this did I realize that i didn’t know what I was doing with this dragon’s back.
That’s all for now; I need to tumble off to bed. I’ve been in a writing/drawing mood these last few days, so if you’re really good and i wake up at a decent time, maybe, just maybe I’ll have something for you, aside from your usual dragon sketch.
