Dragon

I messed around with the order a bit again and this piece of work is something I went back to at the end once I had spare time but is relevant to the fire section of the development. It is one of the pieces of work that I'm most proud of from during this project. I had planned in my timetable to do a drawing of a dragon and/or lion and since I had the time thought I may as well do the drawing of the dragon too.

I'd been looking into buying Letraset Promarkers for a while but was always put off due to their high price. Fortunately I'd recently bought a large selection of colours of Sharpie markers and a good price and learnt that they could be blended in a similar way to the Promarkers. Before using them for my dragon drawing I wanted to experiment first and drew a couple of daffodils with them to try out the technique.

Daffodil drawing

Once I was confident with the technique needed I begun work on the dragon drawing. I drew the outline in fineliner and then used a combination of Sharpie pens and charcoal to add the shading and tone.

Outline

Final outcome

I'm particularly proud of the outcome of this, especially since it's in a different style to the rest of my work - much more illustrative - and is done using a medium I have little previous experience with.

Giving the grass a haircut and drawing with a twig

I next went on to do some drawings and sketched using the photos I took that were inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, that I mentioned in the previous post. The first one I did was a very finely detailed pencil drawing as I wanted to focus on the details of the whole photo before zooming into sections of it to use for textured sketches.

Detailed pencil drawing

 After doing this pencil drawing I played around with it until I found sections that I liked and thought would be interesting for sketching. The two sections I chose are shown below.

Section 1

Section 2

I wanted to use some unusual and innovative materials for these drawings that also related back to the element of earth. For the zoomed in section of the pine cone I used black ink but drew it on with a twig as opposed to a pen. After doing the drawing in black ink I realised it would benefit from another colour to give it more depth and texture so I also added in orange ink.

I wanted to draw the leaf drawing by getting the colour from the the leaves I'd photographed, but after playing around with them for a while and doing some sort of science-y experiment stuff to try and get the chlorophyll out, I realised that probably wasn't going to work. Instead I used grass to get the green colour, which involved going into the garden with scissors and giving the grass a haircut as well as a lot of rubbing grass across the page. Leaving just the green areas on their own didn’t give the drawing much definition and made it extremely difficult to see any outlines of shapes, so I also added fineliner over the top. I varied the density of the lines from the fineliners to create lighter and darker areas and to define the form of the leaves. By viewing this drawing from a distance its structure is more visible as the lines from the fineliner merge to create areas of tone.

Drawing of section 1 

Drawing of section 2