Bulls lower their heads and stamp the ground. Elephants fan their ears and trumpet. This guy? I bet he wags his tail and flaps his little wings eagerly before running you over like a freight train.

I like the color job in general, but I’m having second thoughts about the purple. I’m not sure what would be better though. Any suggestions?

I shamelessly stole the color and stipe concept for this dragon from Zedonks. Yes, that is exactly what you’d expect it to be.

The color job on this makes me happy. It’s just brown, really. But it’s a very pretty, visually interesting brown. It’s nice to see that my coloring skills have developed to the point where I can make a regular old brown animal look exotic. Of course, being a dragon probably helps with that.

This one ended up sort of… geko-y.

I’d been trying for a fishy, mermaid companion animal sort of creature, and I think I mostly succeeded. However, when I take this guy for a walk in my mind (I do this for most of my imaginary animals, to make sure all the bits work. ) I hear a loud *squickaPOP*! *squickaPOP*! from the sucker pads on the undersides of his feet.

Damn you CuteOverload. My active vocabulary now has things like ‘shnozzle’ and ‘stubbular’ in it.

To my relief, a quick google search informs me that the well known grinning nimrod has a green belly, and therefore I did not accidentally draw a little winged Barney.

Forgive me for my Barney directed bile. There are certainly far worse children’s shows out there, it’s just that Barney was the first childrens show I ever watched as an adolescent (while babysitting, I missed watching Barney myself by a few years) and I was mildly revolted by the experience.

Perhaps it’s just my memory, but the shows I remember watching as a kid had charm, plot, and dialogue that was deliberately a bit over the kids’ heads.  I’m a particular fan of that last one. It gave the kid’s brains something to work on (as in real overheard conversation) and it let the adults watch as well without sucumming to brainrot.

In my fantasy of how I will parent (I realize that I cannot really have any concept of what’s involved in being a parent, having never had any kids, but that doesn’t prevent me from planning for the possibility) I’ll have stacks of DVDs of Fraggle Rock, vintage Sesame Street, and the Muppets. There will be a monitor and a DVD player, but- and this is hard for some Americans to concieve of- no cable connection.

That’s right. No TV.

My usual dragon tendency is to draw elegant, flowing forms that are clearly physically coordinated and adept, more cat than alligator. For this one I wanted something a little more like an 70′s style dinosaur reconstruction. A bit more lizard-y, a bit less pretty.

I really like things that are cute for reasons other than Cardinal Cuteness. (Cardinal Cuteness is defined by large eyes, small ineffectual limbs, a large head to body ratio, smallness in general, ect. Basically everything that is hard-wired into humans so that we’ll find our own babies cute enough to want to keep them.) I can just imagine this guy very deliberately stomping his way across a sandy basin, with dignified solemnity and a serious frown. Of course he wouldn’t notice that his butt waggles as he walks and his tail drags from side to side behind him, leaving an amusing wavy groove in his wake.

I liked how it worked out before, so I’m trying it again: It’s project time.

Last time, the Wowphabet was a good excuse to practice working at a steady pace. (Actually, I do naturally draw at a fairly steady pace. Steady as in constantly. But drawing random stuff all the time is very different than drawing themed, stylistically consistent art every day for a month.)

This time, I’m working on using bright colors, and not being so perfectionistic.  Because usually, it goes like this: I’ll spend half an hour on what seems like a terribly important transition or shading, and then when I show it to someone I’ll flip back and forth between the previous and current versions, rather proud of myself and showing off a little. Then the unbiased third party says ‘Wait. What did you do again? I don’t see it.’

When I’m being kind to myself, I refer to this as being overly subtle. For me though, ‘subtlety’ results in a highly detailed, exquisitely shaded grey blob.

So dragons. A dragon a day for…oh, let’s say two weeks. Bright, high contrast, and cute. Because I could use a little proof of ‘hey, I can do cute!’ for portfolio purposes.