Inktober 2017

I got started on this a few days late, so I was playing a bit of catch-up, but I thought it would be fun to participate.

For my part, I thought I'd try to stick to a singular theme for all my efforts, and since I've been wanting to draw more dragons lately, that seemed like a good one.

I'm sorta cheating a tiny bit with these - I'm drawing these in Illustrator rather than on paper with traditional ink, or even using a program like Sketchbook or Photoshop that mimics ink. I am using basically the same "inking" technique that I use on the Mythic Portal tokens.

I did this one right after my Day 1, to get caught up.

Still playing catch-up, though when I finished this one, I was only a day behind.

Didn't QUITE make it on the technical 4th, but I came close!

I blame it on letting this one get a bit out of hand.

Was pretty busy for a lot of the day with non-art stuff, but I did manage to get this one done under the wire.

Don't startle her!

The dragon itself got sort of strangely tribal. I didn't altogether plan on that when I started this one, but I found myself liking it.

I thought about doing something with knotwork, but decided a visual pun would be more fun.

I decided this one needed a little more than just lines

I did the raw linework for this on October 10th, but there was a bunch of extra work I wanted to do to it that I did over the subsequent days.

As I write this, I have not posted my drawing for October 10th in the gallery - I did not skip a day!  I did the bulk of the work on the image, but wanted to put some more time into finishing it off all pretty-like.  I haven't had a chance to go back to it yet, but when I have, I'll give it a permanent home here.

Not a whole lot to say about this one - the prompt was pretty straightforward, and I had a pretty busy day today, so I took the obvious route on it - it's a running dragon.

Establishing the broken glass effect on this one was a tlittle tedious, but I think it turned out extremely well.

Had to post this one at a slight delay again, but here it is all the same.

Every now and then, it vaguely bothers me that there seems to be no generally-accepted term for a large group of dragons.  Probably because they're mythical.  Some candidates I've seen used at various times: a thunder, flight, weyr, pride, blaze, and terror.  My personal favorite, though, is "a devastation."

Oh look, another dragon!  What a surprise!

Had to depart from my normal technique quite a bit for this one, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Felt like going in a bit of a different direction for this one.  Also wanted to do something that wouldn't take long, in light of how many of my Inktober pieces have been labor intensive.

Inspired by the design of Dungeons & Dragons' gold dragon, of course.

This one's inspired by my kids, perhaps unsurprisingly. ;-)

Didn't quite turn out as well as I hoped, but it hopefully at least sort of conveys the right impression.

Another little visual pun this time.

This one works on 2 levels - I'd wanted to do the obvious angry dragon, but once it got underway, my brain fired off a recollection of the latest Mad Max movie as well, so I added a reference to that as well.

Beware when hunting that your prey does not turn the tables...

The prompt for this one gave me pause.  My first, perhaps too obvious, thought was to draw a dragon graphically chowing down, but I really wasn't in the mood for drawing something gory.  That led me to start thinking about other meanings for "juicy" and after the ribald ones, I landed on fruit.  This struck a chord in my memory, as I recalled one of my personal favorite artists, Ursula Vernon, and her piece "The Biting Pear of Salamanca" which got turned into a bizarre internet meme some years ago.  So I decided it would be fun to include a reference to that as my nod to the prompt, and this was the result.

This was a product of some free association in my head, and I don't know if I can exactly reproduce how I got from dragons to Alien.  I'm not sure xenomorphs are actually blind - if they are, they obviously have some means of perceiving their environment that's at least as good - but their lack of eyes makes me associate the word with them anyway.  So, I drew a xenomorphic dragon.

Riffing on the classic Jaws poster, of course.

Perhaps not especially clever, but it was fun.

Ascending to a high altitude is also a form of climbing.

Perhaps a really obvious one, but still counts as a visual pun! Another one that took a pretty long time, but I am really happy with the result.

Tried to keep this one pretty simple (and also G-rated, at my wife's request!), given my limited time and the level of detail Fall took.

"I claim this land for Draconia!"

The cunning use of flags.

This was a bit of a departure from the rest of the series, but given the timing, the prompt, my chosen theme, and their costumes, I decided to make my final Inktober drawing be a portrait of my kids in this year's Halloween costumes.  My son Tyler, dressed as a dragon, is on the left, and my daughter Jenna, dressed as a unicorn pegasus, is on the right.