One thing I always love to see from different artists is progress works of their pieces. It's always interesting to me to see what artwork looked like before it was finished...and in the very beginning.
The Copperwing Dragon started with an idea. I was making eggs for lunch one day and decided that it would be fun to sculpt a dragon hatching from an egg. I cracked the shell carefully, cleaned it, then painted it. In my work space, I worked out a mock-up of what I wanted the dragon to look like...ish.
It was this early that I wrote the story that went along with the Copperwing. I had to keep his habitat in mind to sculpt him an appropriate body. His woody colour scheme was born at the same time.
A loose wire and foil armature followed next, then I broke out the Apoxie Sculpt (this product is very soft, and I can't imagine trying to use it without an armature beneath). Apoxie Sculpt is my favourite clay! It's a two-part clay that takes about three hours to dry (much less in warmer weather), doesn't shrink as it cures, doesn't need to be baked, and is incredibly strong. I fiddled with the snake-like body, and then set hematite beads for eyes into a lump of air-dry clay (I hate air-dry clay. Hate it. You finally get things the way you like, then the brittle stuff crumbles, or gets wet, or shrinks, or...).
Er...and, I guess, added the wire form for the horns. Heh.
The Apoxie Sculpt is so soft that I found I had to wait for each "stage" to cure completely before continuing to sculpt. As a result, this dragon took a couple of weeks to complete.
Next came a snout, and the wire forms for the wings.
Horns are in the foreground. Yep, he still fits around that egg!
I liked the serpent-like look so much that he almost became a very different dragon...or some sort of legless, winged snake. But my "cram-as-much-detail-as-possible-into-a-tiny-sculpt"-ness won out.
Cheek scales, eyelids and the reason I couldn't use a baked clay:
Meanwhile, I was sculpting the wings separately. If anyone is interested, I'll make a separate tutorial for these. It would take a whole post to explain how they were made! Modeled very loosely after bat wings.
Oh lookie! Back spines! Chest scales! A LEG! (The leg actually came much, much later, and after a lot of internal warring over whether I even wanted to add legs. Ultimately he got back legs, but no forelegs. A wyvern!).
His second leg was sculpted, then textures scales and spines were added wherever I felt he needed them.
Then came the moment that almost made me cry:
Yep. Pretty terrible, innit? At this point, I thought I had made a HUGE mistake. I liked the look of the light dragon... and the first brown wash looked terrible.
Several different brown washes, a black wash, a moss-green wash, grey layers, tan layers and much fiddling later, we have an almost-finished-being-painted dragon...but still wingless. I didn't add the wings until last, as I knew they would prevent me from adding as much detail as I wanted, and would most certainly leave me areas I couldn't paint.
The wings were attached, and the whole dragon got a very sparse layer of copper drybrushed on (save for the underbelly and inner surfaces of the wings and cheek membranes, that got pale gold). Voila! The Copperwing Dragon.
Related post: Copperwing Dragon
No comments:
Post a Comment