A dragon for Illustration Friday

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

pumpkin sketch

I got a beautiful pumpkin for my birthday a couple days ago, so today I made a sketch of it, and I like how it turned out.
I might try a watercolor later to capture the color too.

Some sketchbook pages

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.

breakfast sketch

Another quick sketch of something I had standing in front of me: my favorite coffee cup and breakfast bowl. The cup is from Starbucks and the bowl from IKEA, so there’s nothing unique about them, but I still love them and use them every day, so I enjoyed drawing them.

a quick sketch

I was too lazy to get up and get something else to draw, so I did a sketch of all the staff that’s lying around near my bed.

a flower drawing

Sketchbook patterns

Here are two of my latest sketchbook spreads:

Somewhere in the middle of one of these pages I suddenly realised that I use the same process for drawing this kind of patterns as I do while preparing lesson plans (I teach Mandarin Chinese). I put together different kinds of class activities, and then I step back and look if the overall picture is balanced. Then I think something like “there’s too much listening in a row, l should add some reading” and it’s the same as “there is too much triangles here, it would be better to add some lines or circles”.

I’ve never thought of this before, but it seems that I mostly think of my lesson plans in terms of pattern-like balance and compositional beauty, instead of just what is useful for my students’ learning process.

Pot plant #1

Here’s a drawing I made of the plant I have standing on my window.

P.S. The drawing is available in my Society6 shop as prints and other products.

More sketches