Playing With Baby Dragon

As usual I have posted the steps it took to get here so carry on reading if you would like to see them. Slightly different than usual is that I am posting the stages at the end instead of as I go; this is to speed up the painting process.

For this one I have decided to do a better beak down than usual and put steps which there is not a lot done; hope it helps.

Step 1
Here we have the sketch finished and the basic block coloured in. This is how I always start because this is always the main part of my images.



Step 2
A simple but very important step is putting in the dark parts of the skin using a single colour. This has to be made with very definite strokes and stands as a base colour for the entire skin.



Step 3
Again as the last step this is the highlights of the skin. Be careful not to overdo the highlights because skin is not very bright when it comes to the whiteness of it. It reflects other things around it but that is real colour; not bright light.



Step 4
A small step of changing the background colour and adding some clothing. The background colour is useful to help with the shading of the skin because the white of the background will wash out the skin making it harder to see. I always use a colour from the skin when choosing the background colour; almost any mid tone colour will do.



Step 5
This is where I rough in a background that I am looking for. It is not so important what it looks like at this stage but it is important for me to get an idea of where the background is going. The detail will change; the colours will change but it will remain roughly the same until the end (of course unless I change it totally).



Step 6
Adding to the background here with some clouds and tightening up of the mountains. Again this is all rough to give me a direction to head in. Until I get this to a decent state of what I want I don't put any detail in.



Step 7
I have changed the colours of the background to make them more organic so there is more greens and the pinkish is coming from the sky. I changed the floor she was sitting on because it was not working. The sky is coming along here so that is almost set by adding more detail to it.



Step 8
At this stage I needed the picture to have the features otherwise it was not making for very interesting viewing. I toyed with a couple of things but I went for dragons in the end. I start with a rough idea again without the details and go on from there. I have also gone back to the woman and put in the details such as her feet.



Step 9
A small step here but an important one is adding detail to the clouds and her hair.



Step 10
Lots of detail added in this one to almost finish the painting. The dragon has been coloured in. The background has had all the detail with trees etc and the woman has been worked on also. The little flame in her hand has been added and some lighting that makes has been put in also.



Step 11
This is the final touched to make everything fit properly. The baby dragon has changed colour to stand out; there is a lot of red so it makes sense to make him, her? blue to be complimentary to the sky.



Finished
I had to fix her hand holding the flame because it was at a slightly wrong angle but that is all for this version. I add some rough texture over the image to stop it being totally smooth and sign it very tiny next to her right butt cheek.

Job done in two days and it took about 4 hours which is about standard for me these days. Hope you like it and on to the next one.



For more paintings check out the gallery or for more work in progress steps check out the main blog which has plenty more like this.