dragon

Three-Dee Thursdays #2: AVCon 2014 Trophies

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This week I’m showing off the trophies I made at AVCon!

Once again, these were made of laser cut acrylic. The dragon design was done by design-team member Dima. I worked out the trophy design from that.

The overall look is simpler than last year’s – I had a bit less time to mess around with the designs.

Here’s the first prototype:

prototype

And here are a bunch of completed trophies!

finals

This year I sent a bunch of the laser work off to be done by a local business. They were great to work however the cutting side of the acrylic seemed to pick up dust or discolouration or something. It was rather disappointing to find the finish on some of the trophies wasn’t as nice as I’d have liked. I also found out just how drastically the thickness of acrylic sheets can vary and how different laser cutters can have noticeably different kerf widths.

Balance

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I painted this picture as a Christmas present for John back in 2010. When I uploaded it to deviantArt, I promised, “I’ll upload concept and progress sketches to my blog after Christmas.”

Wel’p Christmas came and went and another one too, and it’s finally time for me to fulfil that promise.

The Idea

I wanted to paint a picture that could be quite personal but would also be quite ‘accessible’ to the casual viewer as just a pretty illustration. Based on this I discarded the possibilities of doing portraits and looked instead to find suitable avatars of myself and John. The answer was quite simple – Zodiac animals. What fortune that I had such a great pair of animals to work with, too!

Rawr!

Conflict

Do a google search for ‘dragon tiger’ and you’ll immediately find images of the two locked in combat. Frequently poised over a Yin-Yang symbol, the two animals represent balance.

My first concept sketches attempt to riff on this idea.

Finding my feet with drawing tigers…

<3

Finding nice flowing lines is easy when working in ink.

 

Purpose

The hearts felt hackneyed and the composition uncomfortable. I decided that I wanted to portray the dragon and tiger as an exuberant and harmonised pair. For this I decided to move them in the same direction, as though they were running toward a common goal.

A very tiny thumbnail with the new composition scribbled out. I think I’d intended originally to have the animals in some kind of setting, possibly clouds or a mix of cliffs and flames to go with the elemental years we were born in.

Scribbles to work out the tiger’s pose.

I wanted to present a quite stylised tiger. I had been inspired by a piece of art that had recently been printed on the back cover of ImagineFX.

More experimenting with the style and pose of the tiger.

Unfortunately my laptop was stolen around March 2011 so I’m missing all the Photoshop sketches and any progress scans I took. But for a quick run-down of my process I think it went something like this…

  • Sketches were scanned into Photoshop and composed into a rough arrangement.
  • The sketch was worked on in Photoshop, correcting awkward anatomy and finalising details.
  • The final lines were traced to the watercolour paper (probably straight from my computer screen, as I can’t find a paper-trail (hur hur) to indicate I printed the lines).
  • I laid down washes and underpainting, sprinkling in rubbing alcohol to create texture (it’s most effective in the little bubbles at the top left). I don’t think I used any salt for this painting, and if I did it wasn’t very effective!
  • Lastly I worked up the Dragon and Tiger in a series of layers. The dragon’s scales and the tiger’s stripes were probably added last. I also used a white gel pen to add texture (along the dragon’s hair and in the tiger’s mane).

Like many of my paintings, this one doesn’t have a lot of tonal depth as I was timid about laying down too much paint and being unable to correct mistakes. When choosing a frame and mounting board for the painting I kept this in mind and went for a light mount and a dark, rich frame to bring the viewer’s eye to the painting and complement the tiger’s stripes.

The framed painting now hangs above our bed.

 

Yu Long’s development

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A couple of WIP scans. Click for biggenning.

I’m trying to push the colours and depth of tone in this one. Usually I get a bit wussy and hesitant about adding more and more glazes over bits that I’ve already spent so much time on. It’s going to be interesting trying to emphasise the whites.

Yu Long’s Transformation

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In the famous Monkey story, the Monk spends most of his time travelling on a white (okay, grey for you horse enthusiasts) horse. This horse was actually a dragon – Yu Long, the third son of the Dragon King of the West. He was sentenced to death for burning his father’s pearl and saved by the Goddess of Mercy in order to fulfil the role of the Monk’s steed. (Which was actually quite unnecessary until he accidentally ate the Monk’s horse on their first encounter).

Anyhow, Yu Long then earns a bit of a beating from Monkey and joins the group, after which he spends most of his time stuck as a horse and devoid of personality. I’ve always held an interest in the White Dragon Horse. There’s such potential there that I’d love to see explored. I think in the original story he only gets a couple of opportunities to shed the horse disguise during crises and although he gets to pull some neat tricks I don’t think he actually has much success with his contributions.

Now that you know all about him, maybe you’ve got an idea of why I wanted to draw him.

The latter stages of thumbnailing:

Thumbnails

Post it notes were kind of handy for seeing through to the previous sketch layer

And a more developed sketch. I wanted to add more things to hint at his involvement in the story (however limited that involvement was). The orb in the sky with his tail wrapped around it is supposed to represent the great pearl. I was thinking of putting in some birds to represent where he was found (Eagle Sorrow River), and his brief stint disguised as a princess during which he sang and sword danced for the amusement of a demon lord (and as an attempt to assassinate him). However I think the top left where I’d planned to put them is better left open.

Yu Long leaps from the waves

Water manipulation is easy for a dragon.