Step by step: Freehand dragon on banner

written by MaGie mei 28, 2014

Good day everyone!

As I have received several requests, and I am always glad to oblige, in this post I will present the step by step on how I painted the freehand dragon on the banner of the Dark Elf Sorceress.

By the way, I have also posted the pictures of the sorceress on both CMON and Putty and Paint. I would really appreciate your vote 🙂

Before I start this tutorial, I must say that following the workshop by Stephan Rath (my report here) has given me the first real introduction into painting freehands like this, so he is also to be thanked for this step by step!

The first step is to prime the banner using white primer spray. In a previous step-by-step I already showed how I made the banner.

Step 1
Creating a anatomically correct drawing, that doesn’t look super cartoony is not something I can do without using some guidelines, and also it is not always easy to come up with your own drawing. So I decided to use some google-fu to find a picture/drawing of a drawing I liked.
It was not my intention to make an exact copy of the drawing, there are details that would make it look too crowded in this scale. I decided to go with my gut feeling a bit here.

Step 2
Using a grid can make copying an existing drawing a hundred times easier, so why not use this simple trick?
Using a pencil, I drew a grid on the banner, with 3,5mm squares, and I drew the same amount of squares in a grid on the print-out of the original drawing.

As you can see on the printout, I used an orange marker to draw the general shapes of the figure. I will use this as a guideline in the next step.

Step 3
After that, I started by copying the orange lines in the printout onto the banner. I used a dark purple paint for this, that was diluted 1 part water, 5 parts paints (approximately).

The dragon in the original drawing did not have a neck, and because I didn’t want a floating dragon head I sketched the neck and start of the torso myself, directly onto the banner.

Step 4
This step is an easy paint-by-number step 🙂 I simply block in some diluted colours to get a general idea of everything. It is actually smart to erase the pencil grid before this step, because when it covered with paint this becomes a lot more difficult. I was not so smart, but in the end you cannot see this anymore as it is covered with opaque paints.

Looks so mean now, doesn’t it?

Step 5

Finally, it was time to fill in the shapes for real. It is hard to give dilution ratios, because I just mixed until I was satisfied, using not too strongly diluted paints. If you have difficulties with paint drying to fast on the brush, you could use a drying retardant, or a flow improver that will also make it easier for the paint to leave the brush. I didn’t have anything on hand, so I made due without.

In my mind I started blocking in areas that could be shaded as separate parts. You can see the process of that here:

First I drew painted the lower jaw. At this point I was super satisfied with the depth.

Next came the nose, the forehead, eyebrows and the tube-things for his horns.

Finally I painted the area underneath the eye, and I also made the eye white. What you can clearly see in this picture is that this is the result of two separate painting days. The area above and underneath the eyes is more purple, while the other areas are more pink. This is the result of mixing my own colours, and not exactly replicating the same colour. I will fix it later of course :).

Step 6

With the most important area, the face, being painted, I worked on painting the horns, and the neck. I don’t have a lot of pics of the inbetween steps, simply because I was in the vibe and forgot. If there is any part you would like to get a particular in-depth step-by-step of any part, let me know and I will work on that!

Painted the horns.

The first beginning of the neck, and tiny spikes on the cheek.

Finished the drawing.

Step 7

As I painted the banner separate from the figure, I wanted to put the two together to see how it looked.

As you can see the banner turned out much brighter than the figure, and had stronger colours. I didn’t like that, as I felt that it lost coherece. So, this meant that I needed to make some corrections in the next step.

Step 8

I added some brown washes to the dragon, mainly on the neck area as I wanted the face to stand out still. I also decided at this point to paint some pinky blush on the sorceress lady, to make her a bit brighter, and I added some more colourful glazes to the main figure. I don’t have pictures of this step.

Step 9

I painted the background, because a white background would look too stark. To make the dragon stand out I tried to paint the areas closer to the dragon brighter than the ones further away.
As you can see I also painted the eyes.

Step 10
Lastly, of course I needed to clean up some areas, add some more glazes and paint the rest of the banner. You can see the finished result at the start of this post.

As some people suggested, here is a scaled picture.