#jazzdragon

This is Jazzdragon 12 from 2009, whose color and design were inspired by nudibranchs. The instrument isn't terribly fancy this time, as I wanted most of the effort in the goofy dragon design.

This is Jazzdragon 15, featuring a nightmare of a French horn.

French horns are one of my favorite instruments. I love the complex tubes and the circular shape, and the mellow brass sound of them. I have every intention of upping my game with respect to complicated French horns, with a future Jazzdragon playing some crazy thing with more bells, tubes, valves, and possibly more than one mouthpiece. Yes. A two-player instrument. Haven't tackled that yet. Heh.

This is Jazzdragon 19, one of the largest and most complex in the series. I made this in 2011.

A DA friend sent me a video of a musician playing a contrabass flute - these instruments are amazing, and the player must have had the lungs of a dragon in order to move air through the thing. It was huge! Taller than she was! I wanted to take that up a notch with the Jazzdragon, and make playing the flute a whole-body exercise. So Jazz 19 is playing the sub-sub-contrabass flute with his toes.

The dragon was done in two layers - the main body and that large wing on the left side of the picture. He's colored with Prismacolor pencils and gold paint pen.

This is a Jazzdragon jam session, done in 2007. That's vaguely Kansas City in the background. Most of my focus was on the dragons, naturally.

Here's Jazzdragon 13 from 2009.

I'd been wanting to try to draw something with a keyboard-like arrangement for quite some time. I had to wait for my technical skill to catch up with my imagination, and finally, it did. I was a percussionist in junior high, and as the only one who could read music even a little bit, I often played the vibraphone (with the oscillators turned off). It has a more mellow tone than a glockenspiel or metal xylophone, but of course it resonates different from a marimba or other wooden xylo-type. I thought that a floating version of the instrument would be a lot of fun, and allow me to do some crazy, dynamic movement and curves.

This is Jazzdragon 5, another of the early "dancer" designs. I was trying out some weird pose ideas by this point, and wanted to use forced-perspective on the wings especially. Composition was also an especially strong point for this exercise, with a lot of active diagonal elements and curved lines.

This is Jazzdragon 18 from 2011. It was high time for another percussionist. As I never had the opportunity to play tympani in my junior high band, I let this guy play all of them.

This is Jazzdragon 16 from 2011. I thunk "Dr. Seuss" and "serpent horn" at the same time, and this popped out. You know how it is with mashups.