Dragons in the mirror

So a friend of mine has a birthday coming up, and mentioned, after seeing a piece I did for Dead With Tequila (She's my business partner in crime), that she would love one of her own. She doesn't know it yet, but she's gonna get one. 

I decided to go with an oriental theme, and work a dragon in to. So I then went about drawing a dragon and thought that some of you (or none) might be interested in how I went about this, so I've taken pictures at various stages to show my process.

I started with a basic frame that I could then work off of. Kind of like fleshing out a stick man. 

I then added the shape of the body around this and also defined the basic shape of the head and feet as well as adding some horns.

On top of this I added minimal detail to the body: The under-belly, spines down the back. I drew the whole head in  before I spent to long on it (would have been easy to get carried away on the details).

Here's a close up of the head.

I then went and added in blocks of scales. I didn't want to fill the whole body in this way as it would a) take forever, b) would look messy and c) I would essentially have to do it twice as all of this have to be inked, and i'm not that patient. 

 

This shows part the dragon (let's call him .....Cedric. Why not?)  after he's been inked with a 0.5 mm fine liner.

Haha... Weapons at the ready.

Letraset Promarker Cool Grey 2 (if your interested)
Black, Dark (midnight)Blue and two different shades of red  WHSmith colouring pencils.

No I don't use a fancy brand of pencil; I love these ones, they're a reasonably priced set, the pigment is great, they sharpen well and they really nice to use in my opinion. Some sets on the market are and obscene price, which is fine as an investment if you colour a lot, I don't colour a lot and these do the trick for me. Rant over.

So I've gone around the outside of Cedric with the Promarker for a couple of reasons. First reason: I've got to cut him out and then stick him on something. If I had to cut around every single toe and frond on his mane, bits would get cut off and I'd loose the will to live. Second reason gives him a bit of a lift; after all he's going to be a predominantly black dragon going onto a black background.  

Okay, next step was to add the undertones. He is going to be predominantly black, but I wanted him to appear to have a red tint to him. So to achieve this I colour the patches of scales with the darker red and the go straight in on top of that with the lighter, more orange red to intensify the colour. 

This is the same process that I used on the under-belly but repeated a couple of times. 

It starts to look a little something like this.

With the lighter more orange red, I start to expand these patches a little so that when the black is added over the top it has a more gradual blend to it.

This was the finished result. I had a bit of fun with the head to add some interest. 

Basically I added black lightly over the red scales to blend it all in, and added the dark blue to areas that would have had shadow on them.

Some close ups further down. 

This was the finished product...