Dragon Cave, Dragon creature sheet

Dragon creature design as part of a monthly challenge from Character Design Challenge's Facebook page. 

The challenge itself requires a full body image, rather than the illustration version I have as the first image but I wanted to use this challenge as an experiment with matte painting. As a result, I painted two images, one for an experiment with matte painting, the other for the challenge. 

Designing a dragon, specifically a western dragon, was a new route for me. Typically when I draw dragons, they're of an eastern influence and usually lack the wings of a western dragon. 

It was pretty fun to look at a bunch of animal influences to create a look for the dragon. 

Some animals I looked at were snapping turtles, lizards, komodo dragons, bats, and sharks.

Once I did get the design in place, I sketched up a composition and began adding value and lighting, before placing various textures and images on top.

I definitely wanted the dragon to look scary so a low key palette with sharp contrasts was what I had in mind.

During the painting process, I kept adding more shadows so I could increase the contrast and give the appearance of the dragon emerging from shadow, with the light casted from the fire. 

After completing the illustration, I moved onto the character (creature) design sheet.

I took the sketch from the illustration and built upon it, to save me some time in the sketching.

Unlike the illustration, where I put grayscale values before the images and textures, for this I went with color first before textures. 

I had to remind myself during the color stage to not go full render as I still have textures to add. Once those textures were mostly in, I did paint overs on those textures to help mess with the body and features.

Since my plan was to make this a character (creature) design sheet, I needed details and callouts. So I began sketching out an ortho of the head and then finally the wings. I decided to keep the focus on the dragon, so I took out the flat colors I had for the callouts and kept the sketches somewhat loose. 

All in all, it was a fun challenge and lesson with matte painting and creature (dragon) design. I got to try my hand at two things in one painting (two if you count the sheet and illustration as separates).