100 Dragons and a Knight, 1999?  Nostalgia Monday.

I found this monstrous thing underneath my old bed at my parents’ house!  The paper was easily two or three feet wide, so it had to be photographed.  I’m still very fond of the sirrush in the upper left corner.

Guys.  Guys, I really liked dragons as a kid.  I still do but far less consumingly so

Snap Dragon, 1999.  graphite and watercolor pencils.  Nostalgia Monday.

Haven’t done a Nostalgia Monday in a bit!  This one’s from 1999, I was 13 or 14— a dragon based on a snap dragon flower.  This drawing would be really fun to revisit, maybe I will when things aren’t so hectic!

Speaking of hectic!  I’m going to be in Japan from the 15th to the 25th, so there won’t be much in the way of updates while I’m gone.  (and will be attending MoCCA and TCAF immediately after returning, but that’s a different story)  I’ll try to put some stuff in the queue, and hopefully there will be enough Exquisite Beasts to fill the interim.

Bird Dragon. 1999.  Nostalgia Monday.

I remember drawing this in a hotel room while staying in Atlantic City with my mom for a teaching conference.  It’s admittedly pretty neat to see what difference a year makes!

Well, uh, yeah, and then there’s the coloring.  Listen, I was taking a class at the local community college to learn how to use Photoshop 5 and I thought that “render clouds” was the coolest thing.  You gotta cut me some slack, I was 13 or 14.

Hidden Dragon.  1998.  Nostalgia Monday.

Sorry, I forgot about Nostalgia Monday for a few weeks there.  Here’s the followup from a month after this picture.  This was the first piece of art I ever put on the internet.

I still couldn’t entirely grasp the anatomy (wow, check out all those joints), but it’s kinda crazy seeing the jump in understanding between the last picture and this one.  Good job, 12-year-old me.

Over the holiday I stumbled across my old 486 backup!  I’d forgotten how much pokémon fanart I drew in my early teens. 8|

My Nostalgia Monday | Everyone’s Nostalgia Monday

Happy New Year 2012.  johnny wander comic.

An excuse to draw a dragon?  For me?  Oh 2012, you shouldn’t have.

Dragon Battle.  1998.  Nostalgia Monday.

So remember that part where I mentioned studying the anatomy of wings?  Apparently all that was forgotten pretty quickly.  To my 12-year-old credit, I don’t think I actually understood the underlying skeletal anatomy and was trying to emulate the profile of a wing-shape.  No comment on those bizarre legs.

Anyway, dragons are the coolest.

Eouen, 2002.  Nostalgia Monday, this is nearly ten years old oh jeez I was 16 aaa

I’ve been looking for this picture for a couple weeks now, figured I’d lost it!  Turns out it was on an older hard drive.

Since I’ve been drawing my old pantheon, might as well show off how I used to draw my old pantheon.  Eouen is the cardinal god of the East and technically Dhio and Kaia’s boss.  I was still subscribing to the school of “let’s put some funky elaborate shit on a character that’s pretty memorable right?”  I might just have played Final Fantasy 10.

Someone requested a redesign of Eouen in the comments recently, I’m definitely gonna do it.  I like her too much to leave her with that costume. :/ :\ :/ :\

why am I putting this back on the internet, the internet doesn’t need to remember this

Dargon doodles.  Felt pen doodles from a tiny notebook.

Sometimes when I am bored or waiting for someone I will freehand a doofy dragon in this tiny notebook that lives in my bag.  Here is a compilation of some of them.

This was posted on Johnny Wander a bit ago but here’s a larger version. (click the source for high-res hosted version)

Dany and Drogon.  Ink doodle colored in Photoshop.  Fanart Fridayyy

An ink test I did of Daenerys a while back while prepping to ink a comic.  It’s a mystery over why hadn’t I drawn her yet, it’s almost as though dragons aren’t the coolest and best things.

Oh, erm, hm.  I said I’d stop drawing ASoIaF fanart a while back.  Hmm.  Hmmmm.

Some tattoo design I did during college, 2006.  Nostalgia Monday.

Oh mans you guys, we’re finally back from SPX!  It was seriously amazing beyond anything we could have anticipated, thank you so much to everyone who came by!

This was an assignment for a 2D Design class back in 2006.  It’s kind of nice to look at this and immediately think, “wow, I relied too much on the linework to carry this and there’s not enough lineweight variation, there’s not enough contrast and the dragon doesn’t pop from the background, everything is too rigid and I was scared to push the design.”  It’s good to be able to critique yourself, even if it is five years later.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I have some neat stuff to post this week!

D&D doodles.  Photoshop-colored pencil sketch.

It’s Pizza Hut again!  Pizza Hut, the dragon whose memory we erased and promptly renamed the first thing that came to mind.  Every time I draw him he looks different, and I guess he’s a blue electric D&D dragon and they have unicorn horns or something but whatever, D&D dragons have pretty dumb designs.  Also there is Bo the Dire Bumblebee, who can’t actually talk.

In case we didn’t properly establish it before, I still can’t draw dogs from memory. :/

Eldred Family Portrait.  Photoshop.

In the intense heat of the weekend, Ananth and myself and cat sequestered ourselves into the air conditioned bedroom and didn’t come out until Monday.  I took the time to do a bit of noodly painting on the burning hot Cintiq in recompense for not braving the heat outside.

Pythias and his Dragon Family (Ame his wife, Quetzal their daughter).  He’s also that red dragon I posted the doodle of last week.  These folks are some of my very oldest characters, they’ve been following me around since late middle school/early high school.  I love them all dearly.

Pythias.  Brush & texture experimentation.  Photoshop.

Tried to make a custom Photoshop crowquill brush, inked an old doodle of Pythias.  Tried to emulate a cheap, oldtimey block print.  Didn’t do so great. :/

OH HEY so while we’re on the subject of Pythias.  I started a image reference blog over at pythias.tumblr.com — it’ll be a tagged catalogue of my liked page.  If you like weird illustration/photography/tattoos/iconography with indecipherable tags, maybe it is a thing you will like!  Ananth also just made a reference blog over at alifeofcrime, so take a gander over there as well.

(Aw man, just figured out that you can make a sub-blog from the same login and avoid that sign in/sign out tango.  Oh well, it doesn’t look like you can consolidate tumblrs, so Pythias can live in Chrome.)