Beautiful Oops

I thought that the ink splotch I started with looked like an eyeball, and as I went it just kind of turned into a dragon. I didn't really go into it with a plan but I think making it into a dragon was a good decision because I like how the texture along the edge of the ink makes the eye look.

For this I used pen and watercolour. I chose watercolour because I think it complimented the texture of the scales better than something like coloured pencils would have. I also liked how much easier it was to blend colours with the water colour so I could have more control over specific sections having more focus on one colour or another even within a section that was more or less the same colour.

I had originally planned to do a black and white piece, but I chose to add colour at all because I wanted the eye to pop a bit more and the best way to do that was to give it a colour. I also played with the idea of having only the eye have colour and having the rest greyscale, but I thought with the colour I wanted the eye that adding colour to the whole thing, especially a contrasting colour like the brighter green I chose, would look better. I also struggled a lot with deciding how to show the difference between the sides of the head and the top of the nose, and I played with a few ideas. I started thinking of maybe just giving it a different colour and changing the direction of the scales, but then I thought of maybe doing larger flat scales for the entire bridge of the nose as well as changing the colour, and I really like how that turned out overall.