Well, I actually did know, I had seen the presentation and the contest to name these cute little dragons, but I’m terrible at coming up with names. I could have easily named the fire dragon "Roberto," and it would have been an exotic name, but far from what they want for the lore of these new creatures.
But what I am kind of good at is painting these little creatures in fun and dynamic poses, so you already know I had to get to work on painting this little green dragon to make it look cute, because all the creatures in Holozing are.
I see this dragon as very playful and bouncy, so since it doesn't have wings and probably lives in the forest, it's very likely to be very agile and fast, which is what I wanted to capture from the sketch, which I kept refining until I had a cleaner outline.
Once again, I relied on my trusted technique of using the pen tool to outline the shape of the character and then fill it in. In this case, I subdivided the character into three elements: its head and front paw on one layer, the body, other legs, and tail on another, and the mouth and the delicate little things on its head and tail on the remaining layer. That way, I was able to start adding shadows to give the Grass-type dragon more volume.
To make the little dragon look cute, I had to keep its eyes big and bright, so I went straight to focusing on them, or rather on the one eye that’s visible to the viewer. I also made the little pink things on its head look translucent and very delicate.
I kept adding more and more details to the dragon, making its green skin look more saturated with some scale details here and there. Since the front paw is in the foreground, I wanted to detail it heavily, making the scale patterns really stand out. On the other hand, I did the opposite with the texture of the face, as I didn't want to add too many details so it wouldn’t look old, since I wanted it to be a cute and young dragon.
I could spend hours and days adding more and more details to the little green dragon, but I held back because I want to paint all of them, and I want to create more scenes for Holozing. However, at the pace I’m going, the year will end, and I’ll only have finished a couple more fan arts for the game. So, I set myself a two-hour countdown and during that time, I tried to refine the dragon as much as possible while keeping the scene dynamic and ensuring the dragon looked as cute as possible. Did I succeed? You’ll have to let me know in the comments.
I will leave you a GIF with the whole process on it, so you can better appreciate the illustration process.
▶️
TWITTER |TERRA VIRTUA |NFT SHOWROOM | INSTAGRAM
