Dragon Cave

Photo inspiration yet again. A few years ago I did a quick, little pastel drawing of a unicorn in a cave and waterfall scene (taken in Cyprus, by the way). I came back to the photo because I still wanted to do something more with the scene. One mythical beast to another, here's a (friendly-looking) dragon. I drew it out pretty quickly and didn't spend loads of time with the background, either; I wanted this to be a snappier, but hopefully still effective, piece. Wanted textures to be a strong inclusion here and each section uses a different texture, which helps bring out the kind of serene watery, rocky look I was going for. Nice to do some colouring on the computer again and not have to spend ages on it. As with most, this was hand-drawn and then scanned and worked on in Photoshop.

As I finished this I started drawing out another picture, purely from my mind - no photo inspiration, and that is now also complete and I will probably post that up soon, as well as some trees...

Three Billy Goats Gruff

There are certainly three goats. And a bridge.

Yet again I have used an old photo to inspire me; a few goats stood on some rocks at the same French zoo. As I do appear to like to draw rocks, this seemed a good one to do. I wanted to paint it like the motorbike, but found, as I placed the first bit of paint on the A4 canvas board, that watercolour would be the way to go. The original photo had more than three goats, so I narrowed that down and completely changed the background, too (definitely no bridge!).

Unfortunately scan nor camera got the colours right; the green of the trees in reality is nothing like what you see here, and the tones actually make the balance and quality of the picture not great. I really ummed and ahhed about showing this picture at all -- but what the hey, all a bit of fun.

 

(Detail. Because I can.)

And because I wasn't happy with the scan, I tried a few effects in Photoshop and quite liked the sketchy posterised version:

EDIT: I still wasn't fully happy with the scanned outcome, so here's a camera shot. What a difference. It's pretty faint but at least shows truer greens:

That's enough goats for now.