Lovely Gesture

Sometimes gesture is necessary. Most often I find myself stuck in fine line mode where I have to draw the perfect line and won't stop erasing and retrying until I do. I find there's always an angle or weight issue that just doesn't make physical sense and it's difficult to understand why by looking at line. When drawing objects in space there is always guess work at what you actually see when something loops back and then turns in another direction. You have to imagine what you can actually see and how to translate it on paper to make others believe in what they're looking at.

After a quick mirror for the dragon's symmetry, the first real challenge with compositing these two together was completing the dragon horns. I drew a million lines trying to discover how to perceive a curve twisting back in space. These main horns are spiral in shape but I wanted a specific silhouette. It wasn't until I started scribbling and rotating the scribbles to get the distinct outline and shape that I wanted. Now that I understand the volume I can easily clean it up later.

Scaling his human body down to the scale I understood the dragon to be was the easiest part. Then came legs. At first he was off balance as his weight was not properly distributed to his feet, they were too far forward or their position made a weak pose overall. The best way to accomplish my goal was to first get his back leg positioned correctly beneath his weight. Then zooming out a great deal i based his front leg entirely on strong silhouette which put his foot in the correct place on the ground.

At length I decided I wanted to fill the space and not just have a central floating framed image which I tend to have ALL the time. So with some trial and error I got a body and legs and lots of neck in there with a wisp of tail. I have a feeling I will use his scroll "prop" as a border for the bottom right corner.

Please please click on the image to see better detail. I hope this helps explain some more methods of beginning a work and the options you have when drawing. It's good to remember there's more than one way to get a desired result. Gesture is a fabulous way to conclude proper volume and shape changes in depth and direction. It helps your understanding of the 3D nature of 2D and how lines can do more than just outline a figure. Those horns have full volume and when they're outlined and cleaned and colored this will be reflected just the same.

From this point on it will be cleaning of the lines and polishing up features and details. This no doubt will take the longest to do. That is of course until we come to color. IF we come to color, we'll see how much energy I have by then, and if my fans insist.