September is a month for dragons in our household. Ten years ago, I started the tradition of drawing a dragon for my wife that she can use as her desktop wallpaper, since she works in IT and has to sit in front of a monitor all day. The project has evolved over the years, which I’ve talked about before, but just to recap (since I don’t think anyone follows me closely enough to be expected to remember): I started out just drawing random, semi-stereotypical dragons. I soon hit on the idea of drawing different types of dragons that would live in different biomes, which then lead me to a sort of story idea of an entire planet populated with the evolved descendents of a space-faring dragons species. All animal life can be traced back to the same common ancestor. It’s basically dragon chimeras and at some point I intend to put together a sort of field guide of the planet.

Anyway, I keep a list of potential earth animals to dragonify, but I didn’t have to check it for inspiration this year. I couldn’t not do this.

This year’s dragon is a bit more special than the previous ones. Typically, I try to find an interesting animal that I can mash together with a variety of stereoptypical dragon features. It’s a fun little exercise for me every September, but in recent years I’ve felt like I need to push the envelope more. I don’t feel like I have designed creatures that could have evolved naturally from a common dragon ancestor (which is the whole theme of these gifts for my wife). The features don’t necessarily flow. It’s almost like being a taxidermist and taking bits from different animals and stitching them together. Maybe I’m being overly critical. Despite the amount of time I spend on the illustrations, I’ve decided to conisder them first drafts for the eventual book I want to put together.
Anyway, I refer to this year’s offering as the “Dog Dragon”, but anyone that knows me or my family knows who this is. A little over a month ago we had to say goodbye to our 13+ year old Alaskan Malamute. We thought she was going to die a few years ago until our vet finally figured out she was suffering from an allergy. She had lost much of her beautiful coat, had serious skin irritation, was constantly itchy, had joint and digestive issues, and was just overall so miserable we stopped taking her for walks. Once we had the right diagnosis and started treating her, she bounced back fast and not only went for long walks again, but started digging out her toys to play with. A few months after that, she was diagnosed with cancer and in August of 2025 she had surgery to remove a tumor on her leg. She walked with some assistance from the vet’s office to the car when I picked her up, but never walked on her own again. Aside from that, she was the exact same dog. Loving, attention seeking, and extremely food motivated. The vet had suggested having a quality of life discussion, but we weren’t ready for that and I wanted to give her a fighting chance. I spent a year trying to rehab her, building her custom devices to help get her hind legs working again. I built her a four-wheeled device that allowed me to suspend her via bungie cords and a harness to help regain her strength and coordination. I used a walking harness to take her out on exercise walks around the yard. She made some progress at first, but that stopped over the winter. By August of this year, she had regressed a bit and was starting to show signs of suffering, so we finally had to make the difficult decision to say goodbye.
While the last year was a lot of time-consuming work for me, it was my wife that spent the most time with her over the years. She was the one that took her on hikes and long walks daily, groomed her, bathed her, fed her, gave her treats, etc. When it became apparent that it was time to let her go, I knew what this year’s dragon gift to my wife was going to be.

This one was the most time consuming one by far and (I think) the first time I haven’t finished before her actual birthday (which I missed by six days this year. I’m not happy about that). At 41 hours and 35 minutes, it took more than any several previous illustrations combined. But that’s just fine by me, my wife is well worth that energy and more. I enjoy “sinking my teeth” into these every September and trying to push my artistic abilities a bit. I usually come away having learned some things, improved my skills, honed my process, and had fun. I’m prone to being overly critical of my work – I see the flaws and wish I had caught things or made different decisions earlier in the process – but this one I’m pretty content with. That may change (it usually does), but I’ll try to enjoy the feeling while it lasts.

If you’re interested in the timelapse video of the process from start to finish, accompanied by my ramblings, you can watch it here.

As usual, I noodled away on details that are hard to notice without zooming way in, so here’s my standard close ups.

She was a beautiful dog, I did my best to capture her likeness.

I made another custom brush to lay out the scales. I would “paint” a section and then warp it to fit the form, then draw and paint on top of that on a new layer. It was still extremely time consuming, but it helped a little.

I made a couple of custom brushes for the background trees, but they were just simple silhouettes. For the trees on the edge of the forest, closer to the viewer’s eye, I added some details (I also added snow to all those branches in the background, and THAT took forever).

I have been struggling a lot with drawing fur and hair this year for some reason. This is the first piece I have drawn in a long time where I didn’t experience that frustration.

If you made it this far, thank you. Getting through this piece was a bit of an emotional roller coaster. It’s been about a month and a half since we said goodbye, so there are still things that trigger the blubbering. I was able to loose myself in the process, which was great, but wrapping things up, doing the final edits, presenting the image to my wife, editing the timelapse video, and things like that bring back the emotions. Now that I’ve completed this, it’s time to move on to other things. I need to make more progress on It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time, and Inktober 2026 is right around the corner. But before I sign off, I’ll leave a few pictures of our friend.

This image was my jumping off point and inspiration for this year’s dragon.