Part 3 – Rainy Day Dragon Drawing Continued

This is part 3 in a series of posts sharing much of the creation process for my Rainy Day Dragon. The final drawing was jurried into the Not So Tiny Dragons book for ArtOrder, LLC’s TIny Dragon Art Project Kickstarter.  In the previous post I showed you the start of the drawing. This week’s post gives a look at the tighter drawing, and color ideas for the painting.

To get an idea of the values I needed I imagined what I remember of rainy days, looked at this painting by Gustave Caillebotte, French, 1848-1894, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/20684 and there were some rainy days during the process so I took a few pictures.

I also collected more reference. I needed more information about water on leaves, how the light and values might work. I also needed information about water drops on a branch so I looked at pictures and created my own on a branch outside. This was helpful because it gave me a better idea of what happens to things seen in or through a water droplet.

I placed a sheet of Dura-Lar over my line art on the tracing paper and create a new line art. I tried not to mindlessly trace but instead consciously draw over my own drawing (I thought about where the light was coming from in the picture, line weight, being specific about the shapes rather than generalizing/rounding out forms).

To create the values I used a combination of graphite pencils, as well as the graphite powder in my point sharpener. I used a stomp as well as a textured paper towel to move the powder around. From a previous rainy looking graphite drawing, I discovered I like the textured paper towel because it helps create streaks that seem to mimic rain.

After doing the tighter line drawing, I created some color studies. This helped me figure out values for the final as well as coloration. I was thinking of the gray treefrogs I’ve seen around Minnesota.

In the next post we’ll take a look at some of the painting process.