Recently I was thinking about old characters of mine, and I recalled two dragons - Arkorus and Araia. I actually got as far as like 60 pages of writing for their story! Not including the bits and pieces I wrote out of order.
Anyway, I remembered that they were difficult to draw. They are meant to be small - 3 or 4 ft tall (I'm not sure yet on the exact number) - and stand on their hind legs.
I wanted to try my hand at it again! So here's a look into my process.
First, I spent some time thinking about good reference material for anatomy. Lizards are like dragons, let's go with lizards. Turns out lizards are not really like the dragons that I want to draw, so after about 5 seconds of trying to use a lizard as a reference, I gave up on that, and said, well heck, let's just go for it, no reference, it'll be fine.
First attempt at dragon-ing
As it turns out, it is not just magically fine. For one thing, the pose is pretty stagnant (I admit I was focusing on trying to understand anatomy, not really thinking about posing). The proportions don't feel right at all.
It occurred to me that other people had drawn dragons that sort of looked like this, so I found a picture to refer to for a dragon standing on it's hind legs, and used that pose exactly. I adjusted the proportions to make sure the dragon was smaller and more compact, while still looking correct.
That gave us this, which I was actually very happy with, aside from a few small things. These proportions make a lot of sense, and a more dynamic pose looks better as well.
Some differences: snout shape. The neck is thicker. The arms are longer. The wings are bigger (which I definitely prefer!). The tail's positioning is better. The haunch is more ovular and less round and attaches to the body better, and the feet/bottom part of the legs are more accentuated.
From there, using that sketch as a reference, I drew my own pose.
This is specifically Araia, the white dragon. The pose shows off her mischievous personality, and the proportions feel close to the previous drawing. If anything the legs aren't quite right and the body might be too wide.
Definitely still working on anatomy for this, but I thought it would be fun to share the process, and highlight how helpful references are. :)