An illustration to Max Frei’s books

 

A dragon for Illustration Friday

This week’s topic on Illustration Friday is Dragon, so I just couldn’t resist and made this illustration:

Don’t know what to draw, draw a dragon

I haven’t drawn anything for a few weeks now because I injured my right hand while lifting some heavy boxes, but now it’s finally  better enough to draw with a pencil (it turns out drawing with pens requires a lot more physical effort).

Anyway, I wanted to draw something and just chose the first thing that popped into my head, which happened to be a dragon. Being a big nerd when it comes to dragons, I wanted to draw one that’s anatomically convincing, so I started with a skeleton sketch, then printed it out and traced it for the final drawing.

Dragon City #3

The paint is finally dry, so I was able to take a photo:

I also took a couple pictures of the painting process:

It’s not the first painting in this series, so here are some of the older paintings and sketches:

white forest (dragon city #2)| oil on canvas

dragon city #1 | oil on canvas

Dragon City sketch

More dragon-related sketches

My obsession with dragons is still as strong as ever. I have a special sketchbook dedicated to dragons (not to say that I can actually keep from drawing them everywhere else as well). Here are two of the latest sketches, made with a Micron pen and white ink:

The second one is a dragon city. For some reason I can’t stop drawing (and painting) these cities with tall bridges and arches, and I keep thinking of them as cities dragons could live in. I know they probably don’t even look like cities that much, but that’s what they are in my head.

I’m actually working on another oil painting of one of these dragon cities right now – I guess it’s already turning into a series, as I don’t think this will be the last one.

Chinese Wind god

Here’s my latest oil painting:

I’m rereading Pu Songling’s Strange Tales of Liaozhai, so there was a lot of Chinese mythology on my mind lately. The Wind god idea is not from the book though. I was impressed by the Wind god temple in Tainan that we accidentally stumbled upon during my latest trip to Taiwan (by getting off the bus randomly in an unfamiliar part of town), so I looked up some information about Chinese wind deities on the web.

There are different variations of the Wind God’s appearance in Chinese mythology. Some texts describe a bird with a deer’s head, and some tell it the other way around – a deer with a bird’s head. There are also mentions of leopard patterns and a snake’s tail. I chose the bird-body-deer-head version.

Here are some in-progress photos of the painting:

P.S. Art Prints of the painting (along with canvas prints and other products)  are available in my Society6 shop:

http://society6.com/product/wind-god-f7v_stretched-canvas#6=28

White forest

Here’s my new oil painting. I finished it just before leaving for Taiwan almost three weeks ago, but didn’t have enough time to photograph it properly until now.

I also took some in-progress photos. I had to use my phone, so the quality of the images is pretty low, but you can still see how the painting changes.

P.S. Art Prints available in my Society6 shop.

Rereading The Lord of the Rings – 2

Another LotR-related sketch:

elvish boat | Micron pen in a sketchbook

In spite of there already being millions of Tolkien illustrations out there (some of them pretty cool, others not so much), for some reason I just can’t help drawing these. I guess it’s just that kind of book: you can’t read it without pictures forming in your head.

Dragons

I was browsing through my paintings looking for one of them, and I thought it would be good to gather all of the dragon-related paintings in one post. So here they are.

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P.S. I’ll be updating this post when I have other paintings or drawings with the same theme.