Well, 3 trashed backgrounds later, I think I'm happy with it >< The night sky was not working out at all, not even filled with many sparkly stars. I think that the lighter clouds worked out well. Now I just need to e-mail this to Ultimus and make sure it's allright ^^ Overall I'm happy with it, but those poor, poor, unemployed sparkles...

Now that I've gotten back on my dragon kick, I can't seem to get off it. Dragons used to be pretty much all that I did, but for some reason mid 2002, I stopped drawing them constantly. I think I only drew like 10 dragons that weren't Dolosus from late 2002-early 2004. Having done so many for Northlight really has me wanting to draw more of them. With all the practice I think I'm moving somewhere. They're looking a lot better then my old drawings did!

Anyway, this is something I sketched during Sugoicon and is going to be a title page image for the how to draw dragons book and might turn into a new main page image if I can get the concept to work.

The idea behind this was that the dragon is dull and grey/black, but behind him is a rainbow of paint that arcs into a dragon. This rainbow is really chromatic neon color and casts different shades of light onto the boring dragon, making him sparkle and shine. Because he has no color of his own, he can reflect all the others perfectly.

Where I run into trouble is getting the rainbow color to work. I tried a gradient with really charged color, but it ended up looking gaudy and was difficult to bend into the shape of the arc. I tried airbrushing the rainbow by hand and the colors wouldn't blend or ended up looking muddy. Right now I turned it all black and am completely disgusted. I think I'll shade the dragon and decide what to do with the paint in the background when I'm less appalled. It doesn't look half bad being black, but I want to give my rainbow idea another try before I take the easy way out.