Dragon Month: Four
Daily art for August 2025
This has been a really fun month of dragons. So far, I’ve managed one every day. I’m spending at least an hour, sometimes double that, depending on the complexity of the work and how long I’m needing to wait on drying time between layers. This may not sound like much, but for the rest of the year most days are about fifteen minutes devoted to art daily. It doesn’t take long. With the dragons, there’s a lot more time taken up by skull-sweat, thinking about how I’m going to compose the dragon, execute the complexities of the prompt, and that’s a lot more time than I generally spend on the actual sketching and painting.
If you missed the first weeks of the month, you’ll find them linked and here:
I used frisket1 and artistic licence on this one. Fossil bones are almost never white. However, perception is that bones will be the clean pale color of bleached bones, so I just added shadowing and let the bones pop out of the messy dirt background of paint.
I had some black and a few white mats, to prepare these pieces for being put on display (and up for sale) at P-Con in Dallas next month. I thought since the artwork is whimsical, the mats should be as well, so I ordered colorful mats!
My husband’s comment on this one was that he could tell it was a Lady Dragon, he didn’t know quite why, but she was definitely a Lady. I think it’s the hips.
One more round of these next week! There have been some really challenging concepts to paint, like the prismatic dragon this week. Next week I’ll be attempting a holographic display in watercolor! This month will have taught me so much by the time I’m done with it, and I think I’ll have managed some cute dragons along the way.
A gummy substance you paint onto the paper before you add watercolor, then later when the watercolor part is done and completely dry, you rub away the frisket to reveal the white paper.
I *love* “Dragon in a Cherry Tree”. I would buy it right now if I could. It really speaks to me.
A Fantasy / SciFi cover artist whose name escapes me had in his studio the dried skull of an old and large possum that he used as a model for his dragons. Scary, rather than whimsical.
John in Indy