The Making Of Project Dragon - Episode 2

Designing a Dragon

Now the big showpiece of my project is the dragon. I think lots of people want to do a dragon when they come into the world of C.G. Its just one of those things that draws you.

When designing my dragon, I had a few things I wanted to stick to. It needed to look like a lizard. I have seen a lot of dragons that look like a cross between some crazy eel and a lion, and in my head dragons are reptiles, so I wanted to keep it lizard like. I also wanted it to have four legs and two wings. People have gone on about the anatomical impossiblity of this, and there have been a lot of dragons done with bat like anatomy, but I just want it to be a little bit more like the traditional fantasy dragon. Finally, I wanted the dragon to be red.

As you can see, the design of the dragon matches my desires. Now I will be the first to admit that I am no great shakes when it comes to drawing and could pick out half a dozen things wrong with this picture, but it works as a starting point. Some things you might see are that the head it very reptilian, based on a monitor lizard. The legs, however, are aranged and jointed like a mammalian quadraped, like a dog or a horse. This is to give the dragon more speed on the run and more power to jump into the air.

Once I had this completed I could then move onto thre process of turning this 2D dragon into a 3D reality.
More of that later,
Alex