Instead of critiquing tonight’s sketch at length the way that I have been in the past, I will speak briefly about process:
I was more than a little fatigued and somewhat uninspired. I began with the traditional S-curve neck and head arrangement, at which point I asked myself why I usually did that. So I tried to reinvent the wheel, and quickly realized that it was more of a biomechanical thing that I wasn’t going to be able to fix in the short span of a single night.
So I started futzing around and ended up adding more lizardy-bits, starting with the eyes, eyelids and raggedy dorsal sail. The other facial scales fell into place, and after rummaging through my archive of lizard references, I spent a lot of time looking at an extreme close-up of a desert iguana, trying to figure out what I could co-opt for this dragon.
It’s a lot more detailed than I usually do, and that’s why I am proud of it. I tried to do something like this awhile back, and failed somewhat; I think that that’s also part of it. It still needs a lot more done to it, and that could probably be better accomplished with texture than actual linework.
