Thursday, June 21, 2007


"Pestilence Dragon"

Medium: Graphite on Sketchpad

This sketch is for my next painting. I didn't want to make a 'typical' dragon, so I thought it would be cool to make one that was part insect/arachnid. I added extra eye's..the eyes on the head where you would 'normally' see the dragon's eyes are 'false eyes' - an idea that came to mind when thinking about how different bugs and insects use such tactics as bluff/defense mechanisms. The actual functional sets of eyes on this dragon are the pair upfront nearest the end of the snout and some of the smaller eyes around the sides and back of the head. I added a scorpian stinger at the end of the tail for kicks.


I was fiddling with the legs of the dragon near the edge of the picture frame and got the idea to break them out of the frame, so i did the same with other elements of the dragon and landscape.

This scan got tilted a bit and since Illustrator's web file format saves are terrible I didnt bother sending it to Illustrator to rotate and fix...my current scanner software does not do this well.

4 comments:

Jack Snider said...

Cool dragon. I like the graphic design of the piece.

Anthony Carpenter said...

Excellent dragon design, my friend. Very unique.

I really like the dimensional quality of the composition. You should do more like this.

Michael Mason said...

Thanks Jack and Anthony. It was just one of those spur of the moment things...I know Scott does this kind of thing to great effect, maybe he was an influence here.

Jack Snider said...

I was going to mention the Rosema influence, but to heck with him. He never comments on or reads these thing anyhow. Heh, heh.