By Justin Gerard. Featuring the work of Annie Stegg Gerard.

Every year around this time, I find myself drawing images inspired by tax season. You work all year to bring in a good harvest, and just when you’ve finally got everything stored up and stashed away…. a dragon comes to steal it all.

Annie and I were talking about this theme of dragons plundering the harvest, and we thought it would be fun to each do our own sketch based on the idea and compare them. When we were finished we were surprised to see how different our takes on the subject were, but found those differences to be really interesting and fun. So for this post and the next I am going to be sharing our separate ideas for “Plundering Dragons”. Today’s post will be Annie’s idea, and we will cover mine in the next.

One of the first and most obvious things we discovered is that Annie and I think of mythical animals very differently. She sees them as lovable, adorable little imps; nature spirits to be cared for and loved. Whereas I see them as a pestilential afflictions to be destroyed, or at the very least, controlled.  (Perhaps this is a reflection of how we see our actual pets here at home…  I love our pets by the way, I’m just certain that if they were just a little larger, they would hunt, kill and eat me.)

For Annie’s painting, she chose to work in traditional oils on an 8″ x 10″ inch, gesso-primed, MDF panel. She uses a variety of synthetic brushes, usually holding two at a time; one pristine new brush for sharp details and one ruined brush for rough texture. She uses M. Graham’s Walnut Alkyd Oil as a medium and no solvents.

When I look at the dragon in Annie’s painting I find myself reflexively saying to our dog, “drop it! You drop it this instant!” But you can see the care and love that she pours into the little creature as she paints it. I know if she found this thing on our doorstep, she would feed it and it would be living with us the next day. (And I know it would look at her with pure love in it’s eyes… and at me with, ‘if I were only a little bigger, I’d eat you,’ in it’s eyes…)

Annie’s oil painting of Stolen Harvest will be available on auction starting March 19th on EveryDayOriginal.com.

Sneak Preview: For my next post I will be showing my version of the same theme, which you can probably already see is just a touch more ominous… Â