January MOTM: smoke & glass dragon - painting process // nsfw

here's the process video of january's monster of the month painting, featuring a smoke and glass dragon and her probably-a-nature-goddess girlfriend. download the attached video below! (the file is quite big because this time i didn’t mess up the resolution...!)

first of all i outline the basic anatomical shapes, making sure the bodies and poses make sense before i begin to sketch the other design features. how much detail i add to a sketch before moving on to doing the lineart varies from picture to picture and from design to design. i usually prefer having complex and important things (like the hands and faces) all figured out, and sometimes spending more time detailing the sketch makes it easier and faster to do the lineart. but other times, it feels like a waste of time spending too long on the sketch if i feel comfortable adding certain features during the linearting stage instead. this drawing belongs to the latter category. i started doing the lineart while there was still plenty of details missing from the sketch, because i felt confident in my ability to figure it out as i went along. it helps that i put my concept sketches on the canvas as reference for both the shapes, textures, and colours, keeping them around for much of the process.

the underlying sketch served as guidelines as i 'sculpted' the various features and details onto them. for example the dragon's horns looked really minimal on the sketch, but as of the lineart i gave one of them the sharp, angular edges of obsidian while the other has the rounded, smooth shapes of desert glass. that said, i avoided adding too many lines to the 'surface' areas. i knew that the colouring would center on rendering the contrasting textures of the monster's body, and too many lines would just get in the way and make things look unnecessarily messy.

i briefly experimented with adding some spikes to the dragon's back, but ultimately decided not to. i wanted to give a clear view of the smoke coming off of her, like in the concept sketches, but without obscuring too much of her body. i liked the rounded outline of her bent neck and back, and i already planned for some smoke to overlap her tail, adding a nice touch of depth to an otherwise very stylised element. i thought that giving it a green undertone would look nice with the muted yellow, which is also why i decided to give her girlfriend long green hair that sort of mirrors the smoke.

i blocked in the basic colours on a few separate layers: the girl's skin, her hair, the dragon's whole body in yellow, and the obsidian parts on a layer of its own. the contrast between the pale yellow desert glass and the dark shiny obsidian is one of the most important features of this whole design. i didn't worry about keeping the pattern exactly the same as on either of the concept sketches--it was more important to show it off in a beautiful way, while also keeping the pose easy to read. i put the obsidian parts on a separate layer so i could more easily experiment with plotting out the patches in a good-looking way, and because it'd be easier to work with the different textures on two different layers. 

i also added a separate layer for blocking in the smoke, using just a green brush and the eraser tool to achieve the perfect look. smoke is kind of tricky to draw and as already mentioned i went for a very stylised approach--i wanted it to look wispy and see-through but not too ribbony and insubstantial.

now for the really fun part: rendering the textures. i started with the yellow parts of the dragon's body, using the airbrush to add some basic shifts in hue but quickly changing to a textured brush. i mostly worked from dark to light, that is, my base colour was a muted ochre onto which i painted patches of increasingly pale yellows. before i got too far i started rendering the obsidian bits as well. i began adding both darker and lighter greys to my medium grey base, but to achieve the shiny, subtly striped look of knapped obsidian i would soon use a different technique.

i didn't want to completely finish one part of the image while barely having touched others, though, so for the next little while i worked on various areas of the painting, catching everything up to about the same point. i kept detailing the desert glass parts, shaded the girl’s body and hair, and added overlays of red and yellow to make her look more vibrant. i also added green overlays to both the dragon and the girl, but hid those layers as i went back to working on the textures.

the big challenge was to achieve the contrasting textures while also successfully rendering the shapes of the dragon's musculature. i didn't want her beefiness to 'get lost' in the textures, so i tried to shape the facets of obsidian around the curves and dips of her arms and torso, adding shadows and highlights in a way that enhanced both the volcanic glass texture and the definition of her musculature.

i used the same tiny brush as i had used for the lineart and started going over the obsidian areas, drawing many little strokes beside one another, in a way that created both texture and form. i made a detour to render the smoke, with subtle gradients and stylised lines, but then i kept going over the obsidian a couple more times, in the same way, with both really dark grey and near-white. to achieve even more contrast i created a new layer set to 'multiply' and added some larger dark brush-strokes, as well as another new layer set to 'hard light' where i painted on some specks of pale blue. finally i added some small but very striking highlights in white.

once i was done rendering the textures there wasn't much left to do. i turned on the green layer for good, and you can see how it makes the pose easier to read, as it helps differentiate between overlapping body parts. next i just added some final details and shadows, polished the linework, and added the rounded frame i've been so fond of for the last year or so.

painting all these textures was challenging in a really fun way, and i'm outright proud of the result. if anything i feel like the girl's back is a bit too long and straight, she should be somewhat more 'curled up on herself' in that pose, so that’s something i’ll keep in mind next time i draw someone in a similar position. you live and you learn!

// art + characters © me.