WhatchamaDRAWit

My starting point for this drawing was the WactchamaDRAWit prompt "Draw a dragon playing with a piece of string". I'm glad I got this prompt because it takes me back to one of the things that made me love art. That thing is dragons. Back in middle school, there was an art club that ran for an hour after school every week. Almost every single week when the club ran I went there, sat down, and drew dragons.  I still have a folder sitting in storage that contains most of the drawings I did during that time. Despite all this, at some point, I stopped drawing dragons and started focusing more on people. Creating this drawing was a fun process and made me remember something special.  

This is a drawing done on standard art paper. I used pencil to make a sketch before going over it with a sharpie pen. For the color, I used alcohol markers. The markers are one of my favorite drawing materials, the set I have has a variety of colors which are all really bold and blend well.

The very first thing I did when figuring out the specifics of the drawing was doing a few thumbnail sketches. On the back of the paper, there are rectangular boxes that contain quick sketches meant to plan out the general format and exact subject matter. When I had an idea I was happy with I then did the sketch for the actual drawing, something  I erased and re-did a few times. By using references like lizards for the body and a pouncing cat for the pose I was able to get down a sketch I liked. After that, I used a pen to create line art to color in. I chose to keep to color only the dragon to make it pop.  I also tried adding basic shadowed on the body to make the pice less flat.