FANTASY CREATURES CAN BE HOWEVER THEY LIKE *rainbows*

but srs this is a nice look on it :D


or in the end, just fuck it off no horns rofl

Haha, or the more common excuse for anatomy mistakes, "It's just my style" xD

Yeah, I look at a lot of dragon art outside of the fandom for my inspiration and noticed recently that very few artists do the two-horns-off-the-back-of-the-head look that almost every dragon on FA has (I'm guilty as well!). Usually if it has horns at all, it's got at least six coming out of various places!

Perfect example of the multiple horns done well is Vampire Princess. Sadly she pulled her FA account, but she's still on DA: http://vampireprincess007.deviantart.com.

Bad URL?

grr, the last "." got included in the URL somehow.
http://vampireprincess007.deviantart.com

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
I.
I have a new favorite artist. Though my mind is clashing over if I like her work or Skysealer's more.

Skysealer certainly does nice work, but personally I'm more fond of VP's colour direction and narrative in her illustrations. She's also willing to push her colour and design a lot further and has been making very visible progress over the last several years :)

Why she do that?

If I recall something to do with wanting to get into college/ potential job offers that might turn her down due to her work being on FA and the content there in. But I might be incorrect *shrug*

Wouldn't surprise me. A lot of jobs nowadays do Social Background Checks where they hire a company to scour the internet for every post and comment you've ever left on websites, social communities, Youtube, Blogs, etc and use your social life as a basis for hiring you. Being part of this site could be a blemish to her record just by proximity to the other content hosted here :(

It's really a shame, in some ways. And kind of why I stay away from most places like Facebook, etc.

Naach for me it' just stupid, in that case there will be a days, when people will be losting job, because they talk about their intimate life with second half.

Very very useful info. Thanks!

That was amazingly helpful!

Glad to hear!

Awesome! This is an added help to what you told me about such earlier, not only with textual additions but now comparison and visual differences side by side. Definitely useful.

Thanks for taking your time to make this. ^..^

Most welcome! :)

Well this is quite helpful. :3

Nice skulls. :D

And yeah, this is definitely some food for thought, because I can see a couple of examples of this in my stuff. :S

How to draw your dragon ;)
Very interesting, but unfortunately I can't draw at all.

P.S. Does Photoshop work fine?

Yeah, turned out the nib in my stylus was stuck in a weird way, which is why it seemed to fix itself for a little bit and then broke again. Taking the stylus out and putting it back in solved it :)

Can be very useful! Thank you! =D

very informative I shall have to keep this for further use : D

Ah, I'm pretty sure I make most of these mistakes on a regular basis, I just never really thought about it much before. I know for a fact that I'm guilty of the "closing off the brow" part from the last panel.
Oh well, at least now that I realize it I can try to stop making that same mistake.

I went back to a lot of my old art and tried to fix it all after having it pointed out to me. It's weird because looking back I can see exactly when I started doing it. I picked it up from following my commission reference too closely, and I'm sure many other artists did the same.

Most welcome!
Deer, gazelle, and goats are some of the animals I use as reference for getting it right :)

I feel so retarded right now.

Oh my gosh finally! I've been doing this for ages, known it was wrong, but still could never figure out why! (It's even in my latest friggin submission, how embarrassing!)

Thank you so much for this! Enlignment is painfull but refresing, haha.

Oh man, I always made this mistake when I drew. :<

I think you just helped me tug forward a few horribly pointless milestones from doing everything from comical to attempts at realism slapped together to recognizing the differences between genuine attempts to develop a sense of realism. :|

though will i act on this and work on anything more than a sketch?! I'll probably just go draw more sketched smut in oC, drink root beer, and play PvP games. c___c

But thank you! This has definitely got to be one of those lovely nuggets of wisdom that's so hard to find when dealing with depicting fantasy creatures

Branching horns being the most decorative and difficult to unleash on the canvas x.x

Do you have any other tips? Perhaps advice for someone looking to commission a dragon character from nothing but text reference? Not that I know anyone who needs that advice. *whistles.*

Advice for the artist or advice for the person commissioning the artist?

Advice for the person commissioning the artist.

That's a very broad spectrum to cover, but I guess the two key things are choose the right artist for the job, and for the description, concise and to the point is best. Be careful of making your writing too flowery as the important details can get lost in there and might be overlooked. Keep it down to what is it, what are the colours, and what are the distinguishing marks, and maybe a couple adjectives to drescribe personality. If it's something a bit more complex like a dragon where the word is loose and can look like anything, if you can find other pictures that at least look close to what you want, I recommend including links to those. I've had quite a few commissions where the client didn't have any visual reference, so they would link to four or five other pictures and say "The nose from this one with the horns and frills from that one but without the piercings with the colours of this other one here but more bluish." Personally I find that to be extremely helpful in narrowing down what they want.

Okay, thanks, dude.

Amen, brother!

Somewhere in deep I knew that what you show here, but I must say, various mystakes is nice, if you try to build whole character based on them with of course copying and pasted them in many places in your character :)

So even if it looks like glued, It could looks very nice in final look :) My 2 last characters was born only by mystakes with added much more of them, and I'm sure, I'll be continued that way in future in next characters :)

Perhaps, why this looks odd is because it interrupts the "flow" of the skull. When it has flow, it is appealing. If it does not, well... it just looks "off".

I thought about doing some tutorials like these recently because I think it would really help people out! I know this will! ;)

See, this is the part where someone commissions you to actually draw a dragon with sausages taped to it's eyebrows as horns.

I would never do that...certainly not.

...How much were your commissions again? :3

It's really useful!! I will leaning to draw a some dragon from it...

Helpful!

DAMMIT. I've been doing this for years. Thank you, honestly- This will help me a lot.

So glad that you made this! I want to improve on how I draw dragons and this is definitely helpful. Thank you! :D

Most welcome! Glad that it helps :)

Very nice!