Escora the Blue

Tonight, for your viewing pleasure, I'd like to present a non-canonical character from the Legends of Destiny series. I've been wanting to draw her for a little while, and after much wrestling I finally completed a concept of what she looks like. I apologize if the color is inordinately bright; I still can't seem to tone down the saturation of color on my screen to where it looks normal on other computers. Done in Krita.

Bios:

This is Escora the Blue, sole surviving nestmate of the black dragon Shadowsilk. There was a third nestmate at hatch, but he did not survive to adolescence. Escora is about the same size as her sister, placing her at a length of one hundred and twenty feet from nose to tail tip.

Escora chose to leave the safety of her father's lair at a relatively young age and moved to the eastern coast of Kura-Cora, where she now controls her own small territory along the seashore. She is well known to her neighbors as being tenacious and fierce, having ousted a violent faction from the land she claims as her own. She is fairly adept in magic, particularly with the element of water. Her breath weapon consists of green-tinged fire. It is rumored that she can also produce a lightning breath weapon at will, an attribute which would make her unusual among dragons.

Despite her territorial reputation, Escora is known to be quite civil with parties or persons who travel through her domain for trade or protection.

Escora's name is pronounced: eh-SKOR-uh

Inktober - Phantomfire

For your viewing pleasure, I decided to do a before and after of the coloring so that the line art details are visible. He is very shiny because I didn't want to cover up ALL of the details. The woes of black creatures.....

This is a dragon who appears in Legends of Destiny. I may still change his look a little, but it's been fun to flesh him out.

Blayde

Practice piece done (for now) I am getting more familiar with my new tablet, as well as the program Krita. This is the colored version of a sketch I did of one of the gods from my fantasy series.

On to book covers!

Laiuna card

Yay, another one! It's been a while since I've worked on any of these. I've been busy with writing projects and have had to be careful about how much art I do right now for trading cards. I found that it was actually draining my energy and hindering my ability to write frequently. With Wayside Tales nearing completion, I've been able to come back and look at these cards a little more. It helps that I already had the graphic drawn for the lore drake, too.

Pied and Pure

Here's the second half of art for today.

This features a character that shows up in a future project I'm toying with. I inadvertently found that trying to color ice is a fun challenge while doing this!

Art dump

Time for an art update! I don't have internet at home right now, and it's really hit and miss as to when I can get a good connection that lets me create blog posts. So, here are a few pieces of my recent artwork:

This first piece is a character portrait of a Laiuna (dragon man) named L'ubax. L'ubax features in my current writing project, Wayside Tales. I was very pleased with how well this turned out. Done in Micron pen, brush pen, and colored pencil.

This second picture is a sketch I did of one of the gods from the Legends of Destiny series. I'm hoping to update my art programs so that I can go in and add some color to this in the future. Done in ballpoint pen.

The third image is a piece of fanart I did of two characters from fellow author S. A. Thorup's Legend of Draconite series. This was more of a warm-up piece for me to get back into the swing of things with colored pencils, and it's not my best work, but I still enjoyed drawing it. This is my take on the emotion that one of the characters must have felt when dealing with a very difficult choice. The character on the right, who is holding her, is quite possibly my favorite character in Thorup's entire Chronicles of Libera series.

I do not own these characters - only the artwork. Characters and Legend of Draconite are copyright Sarah Bailey.

Come sit by me, My Sweet

Just playing.

Loddie

I must be nuts, because I keep jumping on the bandwagon to draw stuff for other people. It's fun, but it does tend to wear me out and sometimes I need steam for other projects. I would say it's also hurting my chances at commissions........but lately I've been taking a good look at my art, and it seems a little more, um, childish than I'd like.

Despite that, I think this piece came out pretty good. I was so proud of myself for going around on the dragon's body and doing all these lovely touches of fur, and then I decided I wanted to do something with nighttime lighting. And that meant nuking most all of the lighting I'd done on the body. Bah.......

Character belongs to Orangedragoness.

Actually, it's not my favorite color...

You know, because of the colors I'd used for my online avatar, I think I've given people the wrong idea that my favorite color is green. It's not, actually. I have three favorite colors, in fact, and they're all present in this picture. Can you guess what they are?

So if green isn't my favorite color, then why did I use it for my avatar? Well, why not? When I came up with the dragon character, I wanted it to be all black. And glowing green looks cool against black. It's as simple as that :)

Had some fun with the Neon effect here. I think it's been one of my favorite filter effects on Gimp since I ran across it, partly because it gives such a nice touch to glowing components and partly because I'm lazy. Hey, if the tool is there, use it!

P.S. And my character's markings are still green :) I just decided to play with a touch of Tron stuff here.

Rilus

This was done as a birthday present for Djinni (Tod Wills) over on Livejournal. The character is from an online comic he has, which you can find here.

Done in micron and archival pens with some colored pencil for good measure. Rilus belongs to Tod Wills - no stealie!

Sea dragons

Sea dragons. Sea dragons run. Sorry, I'm tired. It was bound to happen...

Here's another little fun thing I grabbed off Nasan Hardcastle's blog. You find a picture, whether a painting or photo, your own or something that inspires you, and if it has a good value range, you shrink it down until all you have is a few pixels, then paste it into a new image to use as a color palette.

I went through some of my photos to find candidates for this, since I don't feel that confident in the values of my digital paintings. I put the corresponding photo next to the head that I took the colors from. I was going to draw different kinds of dragons with features that aren't standard for me, but I ended up only liking one of the thumbnails I did and then ran with the whole sea monster theme. I think these guys turned out well, though they pale in comparison to the color the photos have. And I'm really not sure if that green one looks enough like a dragon, or just some big, weird seahorse. I tried, I really did. You be the judge of how well they turned out.

Anyhow, let me know what you think! I'd like to slap some of my art like this on stuff that I can actually sell at places like Zazzle or Imagekind (just as examples) but I'm still trying to decide if there'd even be a market for it. There are so many dragon-y things clogging the art media anymore, I don't know how much my stuff would actually stand out. I don't harbor any illusions that my art could be a cash cow. I've seen plenty of artists who have far more training and much higher quality work that are struggling for income. But that's fine - I would only be after a small amount of income to supplement my daytime job, anyway. Ah, I'm rambling because it's late, so I'm going to stop there.....

Ph34r the pink!!!

Just a silly doodle I did today. I found myself sitting there, saying to myself, "Self - draw me a cool pink dragon!"

to which I said, "Okay!"

Biffed it

He missed :)

I hope you enjoy this image as much as I have/am. It makes me giggle, which is good for the heart. I had some fun with the dodge/burn tool on here. Took maybe a couple of hours, give or take a little, from sketch to ink to color, yaaay.