Illustration Friday: Star Gazing

A quick concept developed for this week's IF topic "Star Gazing." Inspired by memories of summertime star gazing dreams. :)

Original sketch posted below; final art above was completed in Photoshop.

More Dragons -- The Sentries

Here's a small version of the rather larger detailed sketch I was just starting to scan the other day. It's from the same "world" as the "Artegal Portrait" I had posted previously; both were inspired from the YA novel "Voices of Dragons" by Carrie Vaughn.

Still have a bit of cleanup to do, and most likely some cutting and pasting as well before I call the layout final and proceed to color. This one will be rather fun to paint, too; based on the descriptions from the book -- one bright green, one red and one somewhat brown dragon about to launch off a cliff somewhere in Montana...or something like that. Hopefully I'll have some time to work on it over the weekend, but I do have some other items to revisit first before I get back to finishing this one.

Acrylics: "Lap Dragons" progress

Started this small acrylic painting last weekend, in the hopes of getting in some traditional art practice at least once a week (in addition to the watercolors I already do) -- it's been entirely too long since I've done any traditional painting on canvas. Believe it or not, I still had one of my old paint tackle boxes from twenty years ago or so...a few of the brushes were still good, but most of the paint was either dried up or separated. But not all!

At the moment, the painting is very much in the rough stage. I'm experimenting for now, applying some of the techniques I've learned from the artist group I belong to locally, as well as from my observations of other artists I appreciate, deciding what I like and don't like or doesn't work for me, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm also applying some of the digital painting skills I've been using when I work in Photoshop, at least in how I work with applying color, strangely enough. I'll post some more progress next week.

I'm somehow not surprised to find myself a little too often wanting to go for CTRL "Z"....not to mention "cut and drag" or "cut and paste"; however, this is not Photoshop. :)

A Bit of Dragon

Here's a detailed view from a sketch I've been working on for a larger illustration. Actual size of the full image with various dragons is about 14x17 inches. The artwork was inspired from the same story as the "Artegal" dragon portrait image that I posted previously, however these dragons are supposed to be older and rather larger. I'll post the color and final sketch once I've finished it all.