Last night, I did an impromptu livestream where I painted The Dragon Dance. It is based on the above drawing from my 2019 Sketchbook, A Plague of Dragons. I began with the traditional drawing, scanned in at a high resolution, and worked from highly transparent layers to fully opaque ones in Photoshop over about 100 layers.
If you missed the livestream, you can check out the video on Twitch by clicking here!
The video shows the latter half of the process, where we focus on adding fine details to the dragons and opaque work to some of the focal points of the scene.
Here is where we began during our stream:
And here is a bit of a preview of where we ended up by the end:
During the stream we covered many important elements of painting dragons, things like scales, lighting, wings, counter-shading, how they would properly hold a machine gun, and the correct way to draw a formal gown on a dragon. It was a delightful stream and thank you to everyone who came by to keep us company while we were live.
I hope you enjoy the video and will join us again next time for another foray into painting quaint-pastoral-landscapes-suddenly-beset-by-mythical-terrors!
-jg
Love your work Justin! Thanks for sharing your process on Twitch!
You’re welcome Sebastian! It was a fun stream! 😀
Love the colors on the dragon’s wings and generally the darker tones of this piece. Oddly though it doesn’t feel dark or heavy in any way. More like somebody discovering a secret bower of dancing leprechauns. Terrific work.
Lovely piece!
There are a lot of things to be excited about in this painting … but the grass takes it all (for me). A lot of movement and it guides the eye so well. Great job!
That was definitely a fun stream 🙂 Machine gun dragons forever.