dragon blog

hmm i haven't drawn a lot of plant life recently so i'm sure you can find tutorials and tips and actual theory from more experienced artists lol. i will try to explain my personal process though... a good general rule is to draw the outlines of things, not each individual detail. it's helpful to practice seeing stuff in terms of contour and silhouette, which contributes to the composition of a background more than line detail. your blocks of color/value should create contrast and lead the eye around the drawing - using really big chunky brushes is good for this part.

i dug up old ass drawings for this yay... anyway specifically for grass and trees, you can focus on the shape that the clumps of leaves make/their shadows (you'll almost never see an individual leaf if you're looking from far away). there's some blur applied but you can see that the tree has layers of light and dark, with scattered tufts suggesting detail rather than outlining everything.

same for this one as well. also never underestimate the power of scribbling, sometimes all the human eye needs is a suggestion and we fill in the rest ourselves.

er i assume you mean the one of refy in the city? i think that's the only one with bg i've posted recently, but my process/design philosophy still applies to older ones too so i'll talk about it

primarily i like to start by finding a color ref for the general mood, because i haven't studied enough bg work to come up with lighting schemes accurately on my own. it's probably my weakest point, so it helps streamline the process a lot. my brain thinks in lines so i like to do a very loose sketch first - this helps me know where the hard edges and layers will be. then using the color ref, i lay down the blocks of color and where major chunks of lighting fall.

i usually have a composition roughly in mind for the subject i want, so here the reference serves as a guide on how colors behave next to each other and not necessarily "i want to draw this specific building". (this is probably a good rule of thumb when moving on to creating your own works and not relying overly on references, but that's a whole other tangent. not that there's a wrong and right way to use references, but in my personal opinion its always more interesting to see how your brain spins things.)

the right image is basically after i did all the render work but it shows that i'm trying to focus on the alignment of lines and shapes while having the focal point of the dragon's head be at a spot where it draws the eye. i actually use as minimal layers as possible, i only had one layer for the buildings and one for the sky at first because it helps with color management and clean edges when i can just draw over stuff.

then i draw the dragon, do color adjustments to help it fit in with the bg , and also add foreground elements, in this case the roof. the separation of foreground, middle ground, and background is probably what gives pieces like this the immersiveness, i like the look of photos on film a lot so i try to emulate that. you can use blur, saturation, and value changes to really emphasize that effect.

I was wondering, is the black-purple one from your latest post a Skydancer by any chance? Since you mentioned there's also non-fr dragons in there, so I'm not 100% sure if it is, but if it IS, where could I find a fullbody of it? They looks so freaking gorgeous 😭

the first one? that's an auraboa

i work in csp

for the chibis, primarily rough sharp marker and default noise brush