Draggin' Along
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
1,932 views
I finally wrapped up my contest entry for Medieval Mayhem, and sent it off to Albert.
I spent quite a lot of time on this one, and it'll likely be my only entry (well... three entries, one illustration).
This is the pencil drawing. Actually, it's a composite of four pencil drawings: the dragon, the castles on their hilltops, the mountain range and clouds, and the knight up on the wall:
The knight was actually a last-minute addition. My other (abandoned) idea was going to use a knight like this one, and I really felt there needed to be something up on that wall. A tower, a flag... something. So the knight got the call.
Drawing different elements on different sheets of paper (using a light table) is a holdover from learning animation. It allows me to re-work one thing, without messing up something that's already done. Once I've got sketches I'm happy with, I scan them into Photoshop, and put them together.
In the case of the dragon, I cleaned up the lines in FreeHand (a vector-based drawing program) before I started painting. I didn't do that with the rest of the elements, since I wanted them to have more of a rough feel to them.
Then it was time to paint. The final file for this illustration (not counting label text to be added later) had 39 layers in it. At least seven of them are just dedicated to fire. 
The final artwork looks like this:
You can see the unfinished edges where the artwork will get cropped before going into the final label design.
Because I'm drawing on paper again and scanning it in (instead of just drawing directly in the computer), I ended up working at an extremely high resolution this time. Usually, I start off at maybe 800 x 800 pixels, but this one ended up at 4200 x 4200, which is completely overkill for a 2 3/4" wide label. For example, here's the knight at 100% size:
On the final label, he'll maybe be 1/4" across.
Oh well. 
And finally, the finished label:
I distorted and offset the letters in the title a bit, to give more of a feeling of "mayhem" to them. It helped them match the energy in the rest of the illustration, too. Just having clean, perfect letters up there wouldn't have worked as well for this design.
I kept the dragon very stylized, since pretty early on there were already a lot of realistic (how can a fantasy creature be realistic?) looking dragons with sharp, pointy teeth being submitted. Besides - I'm a cartoonist. Not a photo-realistic illustrator. Go with your strengths, I say. 
Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The key turning point was getting the sky to look right. Once that happened, the mood of the scene was set, and that dictated how the rest of the illustration was painted.
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