On this fantasy art a dragon and a red haired woman are sitting right next to each other. The woman holding a book in her hands leans toward the dragon. Who are they and more importantly how can a woman and a dragon be together like that? Friendship is a misterious thing, sometimes it happens even when you would think it is not possible.
How the lineart was made
I have made many preparations before jumping to the sketch. I started with an idea which was very different from the end result actually. I wanted to draw a woman leaning to an animal statue while resting on a grass field. I wanted two similar statue on the picture and between them a fountain.
I have made some quick thumbnail sketches of my idea on paper which shortly turned out to be a different idea where the woman was sitting on top of the stairs of a tower. There was only one statue, and on the left you could see the wall of the tower. On the right side you could see the land from above. This was the idea I decided to draw.
I have never draw a dragon before so I needed to understand the anatomy of a dragon and how they “worked”. I did my research focusing on the different type of dragons and how they looked like in different poses. I’ve made many dragon sketches before I jumped to draw the image.
I drew the sketch very lightly so I had more options for corrections. Once I was satisfied with the sketch I cleaned it up and made the important lines stronger. Signed it and it was ready for scan.
The painting process of a fantasy art
Since I’ve made the lineart on paper I needed to scan the lines into my computer. I scanned it in using a 300 dpi setting. After the scan I cleaned up the artwork a little, I’ve removed the bigger dusts and black dots that appeared after scanning. I prepared the image for painting. I have made the background closed to white and made the lines dark then saved it. This version was saved just for the pencil artwork.
I have made a new version (a new file actually) for the coloring and started to work on that from here. Since I knew that the paper texture might be visible on the painting and I didn’t want that I have made the paper even more white – as white as possible. Some of my lines even vanished but it didn’t matter because I only wanted to use the lines as guidelines. The lines won’t be visible at the end.
I have made a new layer below the linework (which was set to multiply) and put down the basic colors for each part: sky, garden, dress, skin etc. I’ve painted the sky and the land first then I have added some soft shadows and highlights to the dragon and finally to the girl and the tower.
Once everything was down I started detailing the painting. This means I have added the clouds, cleaned up the lines (removed them), sharpened some part and so on. All of this was done on new layers above the lineart.
Somehow I didn’t like the walls on the left side so I have removed them. That was not the only change. With the removal of the wall the composition has changed and there was too much space around the dragon so I have “zoomed in” on the artwork meaning I have resized everything until I felt the composiotion was right.
After I was happy with that I have turned to the woman and started to work more on her face. Sometimes I still went back to the dragon, made some modifications and then returned to the woman again. The last step was adding some shine where the dragon’s skin met the sky and to the dress of the woman.
Together is available at Zazzle. You can buy it as a poster, or on other itemes, like phone cases, postcards, mousepads, etc. Bring the dragon home. :)