Dragon Hunter

process and painting for the love of it

Well well well. Last time I posted I was talking about daily practice and just as I predicted I fell off that. It’s fine though. I knew it was going to happen because in spite of my best intentions, I know myself.

Painting is painful a lot of the time. I do it for my job, so I do it almost every day, and with that comes baggage and compromise and a forced distancing myself from it. I’m extremely burnt out right now in a way that I’m still sorting through.

However I’m also producing some of my best personal work right now. Another common theme for me. At a sort of turning point in any major burnout, I tend to fall into personal work. I think it’s stubbornness. I love art, it’s a part of me and I refuse to lose it and myself in the struggle to make a place for myself in the world of entertainment production art.

The balance of doing it every day for corporations vs doing it for the joy and love of it sometimes feels impossible. There are moments when I’m chest deep in the production of some game asset or book or a combination of way too many projects at once where I fully lose hope that I’ll be able to make paintings for me again. Then I get flooded with inspiration and ideas and I’m losing myself for days in a painting where every moment is what I want. Where I know the plan, I know my process, and I trust it. I let it carry me through the whole thing and am reminded that I am good at this. I can do this. I don’t need to impress anyone because I can still jump head first into a painting and find joy in the entire thing.

It doesn’t matter if people think it’s my best, it doesn’t matter if it’s to anyone’s taste but mine. It doesn’t matter how marketable or on brand it is for x mega corp or giant publisher. Controversial opinion but it doesn’t matter how well it does on social media. I love it and that’s enough to push me forward.

now here’s my recipe for the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Lol kidding but I did say there’s process here and I know I did quite a lot of preamble to get here, but I swear it’s important. This is one of those paintings for me. I had this idea for over a year and I just couldn’t get around to it. I finally gave myself some space and some time and the feeling was just right so it came out better than how I anticipated. Always a win.

Here’s the final, I call it Dragon Hunter

Simple enough, knight on horseback goes to slay a dragon, can’t find it. I wanted a classic storybook vibe and for it to feel painterly. That’s pretty much it, that was the goal.

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Step one is thumbnail which I’m going to be honest, I spend a long long time thinking about paintings. I plan them all out in my head. I think about the story I’m trying to tell. I move it around like an animated sequence. I think about it in the shower randomly, in bed at night, eating breakfast. Ideas for paintings rattle around in there for a long time so by the time I’m ready to give it a shot, the thumbnail stage is just me putting down a handful of lines to make sure what’s been baking in my head is going to come out roughly how I want it.

I had also already drawn this horse. It was from a study of a photo I took of a friend’s horse agitated and scared. Why redraw something I already did. I copy pasted it from my study file and dropped it in here.

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A bit more cleaning up, roughed in maybe a foreground, dragon’s head, knight. These are only ever for me to see. I’m pre-solving some problems and just sort of place holding stuff. I’m really not a sketch person for paintings like this. I get my basics in and solve a lot of problems in paint. That’s the beauty of photoshop and digital, you can do that. It’s the pain point of doing something like a cover illustration for a publisher. They want to see multiple super tight versions of it all all stages.

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Next step is just some super roughed in brushy darks on a toned back. I knew the painting was going to be primarily green, so the base is reddish orange for contrast.

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I start to rough in the two extremes of green I’m going to use. That really vibrant grass green and a bluer green.

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roughed in the horse and rider vaguely in an approximation of their values. I start to rough in trees and the serpentine body of the dragon. I’m just messing around here. I think I change almost all of this. A lot of the composition here relies on the dragon blending in to foliage but not so much that it’s fully lost, more of a second read. so I am figuring out how to use color and value together to create the contrast I want while laying this out. I’m just messing about till it clicks into place, really.

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Not much has changed here, you can just see me exploring what to do with branches and how they interact with the dragon. I’m testing out foliage and messing with what’s happening behind the knight

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Messing with tree trunk placement some more, throwing a foreground tree with foliage in there.

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I’m starting to refine now. The head of the dragon is resting on its body still in this version. I move that later. Testing values between the foliage and the body of the dragon and figuring out what I want to do with how the long body wraps around the branches

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Got the knight and the horse basically painted in. I realized I wanted them moved over a bit so I shifted them into the frame more.

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Here’s where I decided to pull the dragon’s head around the tree. Having the head hidden was more subtle for sure but the mood wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I knew I could still keep it fairly knocked back by keeping the values tight and painting leaf clusters to look similarly shaped. In the rest of the painting there’s more shape, value and color exploration, refining some areas I’m feeling confident with. I change almost all of it later but I’m just exploring getting some stuff blocked in a bit tighter.

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The dragon’s face was next. My main focal point is the horse and knight followed by the dragon’s face so I give it some time here. I’m overall confident with the composition and am ready to really start digging into more detail.

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Tons more detail and refining. Added a left foreground tree and a leaf cluster shape mimicking the shape of the dragon’s head to help blend the dragon into the environment. My third read is the belly touching the branch, so I spend some time on that and get some contrasting color and value around it, being careful to make it pop out but not too much.
I refine the right foreground trees, darken them and get some lighter value in the foliage behind them to make them stand out.

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Lightened the area behind the right foreground trees even more, then detailed out the horse and Knight. I added in all of the medieval decorative tack and put a big red feather on the knight’s helm pushing forward to help with the feeling that the horse is stopping or the dragon is blowing on the back of his neck or some combination of the two.

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Here’s where I extended the painting out more, you probably noticed bits of extra grey space around the painting in previous shots. The canvas was actually much bigger all around that I was working on. I keep my reference on my canvas at all times, just kind of staggered around the painting. If I do decide to extend the painting a bit I can just sort of paint out more. In this case I felt the dragon was too close to the edge and the rider I wanted just a tiny bit more centered.

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Final detail pass. Really polishing up those focal points, adding some textural stuff. I added the knight’s scabbard and sword because I had forgotten to do it earlier. Also made the path the rider had taken from the left side of the scene more apparent.

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Final lighting and value adjusts. I did these earlier in the painting but I don’t really do the final adjusts till the very end.

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And here’s all of it together in a little gif.