-By Jesper Ejsing

Here is a dragon painting I did together with Even Mehl Amundsen.   It is for packaging of Protective sleeves by Arcane Tinmen. This is only the first of many dragons Even and I did for them.

The process was quite fun, and not very organized. I did a rough sketch of a dragon gliding through the air. My idea for this one was a dragon that never lands. The legs are small and almost gone. The wings neck and especially the tail is long and aero dynamic. I gave it a huge fin-like ridge, to make the mind think of a sail fish gliding in the water.

thumb sketch

Then Even took over and refined the sketch. He added values and details and cleared up all the rough unclear areas where I, to be honest had no idea what was happening, and then he gave it back. I was surprised with the more scale-like face, almost like a bone/dinosaur face. In my mind the dragon had a slick skin, like  a dolphin, but even apparently saw something else. It is great to be put out of your ideas and have to go with the ideas of someone else. I pushed the smile of the mouth and added loose skin and texture. To be able to be used for packaging the image needed a whole lot of background: Even if the actual front is only the cropped dragon face and wings, the wrap around of the box forced us to do a lot of sky and clouds.

roughed in cloudscape

I wanted to jump some fences here and slashed down some clouds with a cloud brush. It dawned on me that I would have to render these clouds a lot and it would take forever. I tied to do a Radial Blur of the sky just to blur it up before rendering, but was really surprised at how much motion it gave to the flying of the dragon, AND the background seemed almost done. A couple of more minutes of rendering and it was done. because of the big empty area of sky we suggested to the Arcane Tinmen that they should perhaps consider doing this image, and the rest to follow, as playmats also. They were super happy about the idea and we only noticed late rthat this would ofcause mean a lot more work for us…dammit.

But the pictures are better that way. “So Jesper, Stop complaining and do some dragons.”