Monday 24 September 2012

Chinese dragons

So my sister saw the doodles I drew, and wants me to draw something similar for her! She's asked for a drawing of a guy with a Chinese dragon for an arm. It's not what my doodle was of, but I admit that it does look rather serpentine. I'm not particularly fond of the traditional Chinese image of dragons - I've always thought they look a bit silly, and not as impressive as the more western style, but it's what she wants so I'll run with it. I've had to look up a couple of pictures of Chinese style dragons for a starting point, as I'm not used to drawing them. The first place I looked was volume 2 of Fantasy Art magazine (which I totally recommend if you're into fantasy drawing, whether or not you can use digital media, which the magazine focuses on), as it contains the only image I've ever seen of a Chinese dragon that I actually like:

Celestial Party, by Amber Hill. Her website is vantid.deviantart.com, which I recommend taking a look at.
 
There are a variety of representations out there, but they all seem to have a lot of facial hair including really long strands of whiskers coming from the snout (silly looking things I say!). Some of them seem to have the facial structure of a different animal, and a scan through wikipedia showed that some specific dragons in Chinese mythology do indeed have the faces of different animals, including that of a human. To make things a bit more interesting for me therefore, I've decided to use the face of a wolf for my drawing. I could pretend that the reason is because wolves are similarly majestic, etc. but really it's just because I really, really like wolves. Initial sketches to follow.

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