Dragon Month: Three

Painting dragons every day in August

If you’d like to catch up with the prompts, you’ll find them in this post:

and if you missed last weeks post full of dragons, it’s here:

This week I hit some speed bumps. I’ve done monthly prompt challenges like this one for years, and I’ve learned some things about my media, and myself. In this case the media is watercolors, of which I have a wide selection of quality and colors, inks, same, and the problems I had were mostly with the paper. Watercolor paper, for those who aren’t artists, isn’t just paper. I don’t want to wade too far into the weeds (thar be chiggers in thar) but suffice it to say I bought two blocks¹ of watercolor paper in preparation for August, in two sizes and brands for variety. One of those is really good paper. The other is not, and I only learned that when painting my dragon weathervane.

The other speed bump was feeling significantly unwell for a good portion of the week. I’m feeling better now, but for a few days I was kinda miserable and not doing my best work. But one thing I’ve learned over the years? That’s ok. You’re going to have days like that. Instead of tossing those bumpy (literally in one case) pieces, I’m including them, and I did learn while I was working on them. Also, I feel good about having the discipline to make my art when really all I wanted to do was sleep.

For this, I was painting an origami dragon, so first I looked up instructions on how to make an origami dragon, then used it as a reference.

If you’d like to learn how to make your own origami dragon, this one is really cool. I didn’t follow the instructions all the way, I wound up doing my own thing as my paper was too small to do his version.

As I referenced above, this one was trouble. I wanted to work wet-in-wet for the sky and trees to give them a soft out-of-focus feel, bringing the dragon weathervane to the foreground of the painting and making the illusion of depth. Instead, the paper buckled, allowing pooling of paints and uneven deposition of pigment. The softness of the paper also meant crisp edges on the later parts of the painting were impossible to achieve.

On the same paper as the weathervane, this painting has similar issues, but I anticipated some of them and worked around it. Invisible dragon was a challenge to paint! Imagine driving through a snowstorm and suddenly there’s a dragon…

On a sick day, I kind of lost the thread partway through making up a dragon constellation outline. This is a Pilot G2 pen for the white ink lines, one of the new pens, and it did all right on layers of watercolor wash when fully dry. And I think my stars are improving. If you drop white watercolor into wet, it does some interesting things.

Dragon relighting a candle from the smoke. Another sick day, but I packed a travel kit and moved from the studio to the couch. Watched a show and slowly sketched, painted, learned my pen in the kit isn’t waterproof, started over, and came up with this guy. Very happy with him and how it came out.

Dragon door knocker. Another sick day curled up on the couch with paints and pens. Pretty happy with the sketchbook paper holding up to multiple washes to get the door the right brown with ‘wood’ grain.

Stay tuned! I generally share my daily work on various social medias, but I’ll be doing these posts all month to talk about what I’m doing, why, and what I’m learning along the way.

1. Ok, small way into the weeds: a watercolor block is sheets of thick paper glued together at the edges with only a small space to insert a blade and cut the top sheet off when you’re done painting it. This keeps the paper, in theory, flat while you are putting a lot of water and washes on it. If you don’t have a block, you can tape the paper to a hard, water-resistant surface while you are working. Use artist’s or painter’s tape for this, so it will come off easily when you’re done and the painting is completely dry.