Another year, another dragon. I probably say that every year, but I don’t care. For anyone new or for anyone that doesn’t remember (I don’t assume anyone follows me closely enough to remember these things), many years ago I started a tradition of drawing a dragon for my wife’s birthday that she can use as her PC wallpaper. She sits in front of a monitor all day for work, so this is my attempt to make her often challenging, long, and frustrating days slightly better. Aside from being my best friend and the love of my life and all that, she’s a pretty amazing woman. Physically, mentally, and emotionally strong; a hard worker that always makes sacrifices to benefit her family; a great mom. These annual illustrations are just a small way I try to let her know I appreciate her.

The thinking behind all these dragons (except for the first couple when the idea was new) is that there was a planet inhabited by an advanced species of dragon that had to flee to a new world when theirs was destroyed. Either through infighting or another catastrophy, the dragons wind up back in their own version of the stone age, their numbers dwindling and smaller populations separated across the new planet. Either through intent or natural evolution (I haven’t decided which yet; is it an allegory for humanity and our apparent lust for self-destruction, or maybe thinking so highly of your place in the natural order that you fail to heed all the warning signs to prepare for a natural disaster, or some other unforseen catastrophy), they wind up adapting and filling all the ecological niches on their new home, so it’s a world where every living thing is descended from the same common dragon ancestor. Basically that’s my head canon for all these dragon chimeras that are usually just mashups between a dragon and some earth species.

This year, after consulting my list (and having several people randomly post about or share pictures of this animal just prior to me sitting down to work on it), I went with a porcupine:

2025’s dragon chimera is a porcupine dragon. As always, things I like, things I don’t like. I think I need to mess around with making the mashups look more natural in future iterations, try to make them look like a more logical evolution rather than a hodgepodge of features. Maybe I’m being overly critical.

And of course, what would the annual dragon illustration posting be without a few extreme closeups of all the little details and textures I lose myself in that most viewers probably don’t notice or can’t even be seen without zooming in a ton (it’s a sickness I have).

I looked at some rooster legs and feet, which is what I often do for my dragon designs. I’ve always thought they have more dragon-like qualities than lizards and alligators and such.

I made a porcupine quill brush just for this illustration. Not sure I’ll have use for it again (outside of future renditions of this dragon species), but it sure saved me a ton of time. Each banded quill is a single brush stroke.

I had fun painting some of the textures.

Over the years I have tried to put the dragons in natural settings, doing natural things. I want them to look more like something from a nature documentary or photos in a field guide than static illustrations. Sometimes I throw in a second or a third dragon to that end. What I haven’t done yet is have any of the dragons interact with other dragon species…something I might mess around with at some point.

I really enjoy drawing this type of tree bark. I like the chunky, plate-like texture.

If you want to see this illustration unfold while listening to my wonderful commentary (that bit was sarcasm, folks), you can check out the timelapse video on my YouTube channel.

This was another fun one to work on, and yet another time I felt like I could have continued to noodle away at things indefinitely. There will always be things I want to go back and fix (I just spotted a few proofreading this post), but at a certain point I have to call things “done” (for now). For the record, this one clocked in at 25 hours and 23 minutes of actual drawing time, not including some of the image research and experiments with making brushes to speed up the process. As is usually the case with these particular illustrations, I learned some things, refined my workflow, and made a little progress towards my never ending quest to find the perfect blend of all the different media I look to work in and look at: pencil sketching and rendering, pen and ink link work and hatching, ink wash/grey tones, paper textures, paint textures, pencil textures…

In other art (instead of in other news), I have been plugging away at turning the “It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time” web comic into a full-fledged graphic novel. Over the summer I finished the script for the first main chunk of story (I realized a while ago this is going to be a bit of a perpetual story covering several different adventures eventually) and I’ve been working on character designs. I’m excited to go back and edit the script and really polish things up and pull things together, and I’m really itching to start drawing actual comic pages. It’s exciting. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for most of my life, to tell stories in the comics/graphic novel format.

Next up, though, is preparing for Inktober, which is just around the corner. The prompt list came out at the start of September, but I’ve only had a chance to look it over once or twice. I want to really sit down with the list, set up my document with the definitions, and start thumbnailing all 31 ideas before October 1st. I usually fall behind and spill over into November, but my goal is always to minimize how much extra time I take. I really don’t want to lost momentum on IPMDT.

Anywhat, this post has gone on long enough. If you want to keep more regular tabs on what I’m doing, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Deviant Art, and now Blue Sky.