Further progress

I'm so pleased that I have not only started an art project that means a lot to me, but have nearly finished it. It's taken me over 20 hours to work on this, and wow, it's kind of fun to see it evolve.

Day 3: I mixed gauche and ink together and painted the dragon. My 11 yr old daughter followed along and salted the paint as I worked around the dragon. I wanted to set the texture for the future scales. After all that had dried, I then went in and inked part of the butterfly. I wasn't sure how I wanted to do the dragon's head, so I left that alone.

Just a side note: That butterfly is NOT red. I can't get photoshop or my camera to get the pink and purple to show correctly, so... meh. You'll always see it as red digitally.

Yesterday (Friday April 17) I went in with ink and drew in the scales. And then, because my white gauche paint was all dried up, I mixed blue gauche and white acrylic and then used a small paint brush to add the white highlights to the scales. I am kind of pleased with the final effect.

Using the same blue, I colored in the butterfly. Originally I had in mind that I wanted the butterfly to look like it was merging with, or matching the dragon. But then I decided it needed to be it's own separate self. So I painted over some of the blue on the main wing of the butterfly. I just felt that the white looked better.

And then I did the head and horns of the dragon. It's difficult to see what I did with the horns in this picture, but I am pleased with how they turned out.

All that is left now is to add a background. If I had known what I was going to do with this when I started, I would have already had a background laid out. As it is, well, we'll see what happens.

I think this is one of the few colored pieces I have ever done that I am proud of. But maybe that's because it means something to me. I poured a lot of emotion into this one. It took a lot of patience and a lot of steps to complete.

I'll admit right now that patience in art is very hard for me, except when I'm working on a portrait. To learn that I can do it with other art is fascinating to me.

I have no idea which emotions I'll be exploring next. I have no idea if I'll attempt another dragon. Right now I'm going off my gut, and this is what came of it.


On a side note, someone offered me $20 for this piece. I am hoping that was a joke, because I sure laughed. At worst, it's worth at least $150. For me, it's priceless because of what it represents, and it is NOT for sale.