Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A Comprehensive Guide To Dragons: Entry 1


I have decided to use one of my Christmas journals for an art project. This book will now be called "A Comprehensive Guide To Dragons" (aCGtD for short), and I am going to be hopefully doing quite a lot of dragon sketches inside of it. I've already finished my first entry, so I am going to post images of the pages here on the blog. I hope you'll enjoy this new stream of posts/art that I'll be attempting to do.



This is a pretty important introductory page. Many of you who read my blog may be able to decipher some of the HTTYD runes that I use, but I will also be including some other special alphabets in order to put fun, kinda secret notes all throughout this thing. Feel free to use this page as a reference! I might also note that the sheer number of scripts I'm using is a pretty good indicator of where this journal is going. Unlike most other single-theme journals I have done, this one will be a mix of dragons from every fandom that I like. This means there will be a lot of HTTYD, but also a fair amount of Fire Emblem, LoZ, Harry Potter, and other similar franchises. 


Every quality piece of research needs a quality title page! Oh, and the little text beneath the title... that ensures I have wiggle room in case I ever want to draw something that isn't exactly a dragon in this journal if I ever want to. I plan to focus mostly on dragons, but you never know what cool thing I may come across in the coming years!


Entry one is my number one! After all, who else could I start this off with other than Toothless. Haha, he was designed to sort of be the "ultimate dragon", and I certainly think he is :) One thing to note about this journal is that it will work a little differently from my earlier ones. I've done at least two dragon journals, and both of them have focused on movie "facts" about the creatures. What I mean by this is that in my older journals I would have been listing things like the length of the dragon, or the class it is in, or the fire type it has, or the kind of food it eats. This journal is more of a study of character design, so I am going to be focusing on the aspects of how the dragons have been designed that really make them stand out as unique, amazing creatures. That means I'll spend a lot of time talking about how the dragons look and act, as well as how they were designed. In the end, I sort of want this to be a sort of visual guide to all the different designs of dragons you might come across in the many different franchises that exist. I will be biased, I will probably make comparisons, but you don't have to agree with me! I just hope you'll enjoy the art and be interested in what I wind up writing down!


Many dragons will probably get two pages devoted to them. Toothless certainly needed two, I big aspect of his design is how quickly he can go from being very intimidating, mysterious, and frightening to cute, loyal, and fun... and vice verse. I also wanted to show off the split spines from the second film. I went with two different positions for him as well: one on the ground and one in the air. Two pictures really is not enough to capture all the complexities of Toothless's design, so you can probably count on seeing a "Night Fury: continued" entry somewhere down the line. After all, his head anatomy and facial expressions alone deserve an entry all to themselves! 

Welp, that's my first two entires. What do you guys think of them? Do you like the idea of doing this journal, or would you rather see more of another kind of blog post? Feel free to comment and let me know!

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