Lee’s Dragons: Elephant Dragon

For my wife’s annual birthday dragon 2023, I kind of knew what I wanted to do well ahead of time. Given that the whole concept of these illustrations is that there’s a planet basically terraformed by dragons, that eventually evolve and speciate to occupy all the different biotic zones, I try to think of an environment first, then figure out what would live there. Right now, everything is heavily influenced by life and ecology on earth, but I hope to deviate from that eventually. With these illustrations, I’m trying to avoid duplicate environments until I’ve done more of them, and one I haven’t explored yet is a savannah-type grassland.
I was leaning towards something elephantine, but I wasn’t 100% convinced, so I asked my kids what they thought I should draw inspiration from this year. Two of them, without any input from me, said elephant, so, here we are.
I had a rough vision for the head with the crest (which is inspired by a one-off illustration I did on the original opening page of my graphic novel Revery eons ago), I knew I wanted tusks (because big sharp teeth are cool), and I had a general sense of body shape. Everything else was a bit of a struggle at first. Obviously, one of the defining characteristics of an elephant is its trunk, but it didn’t make much sense to have a trunk on something that already had a long, flexible neck in my mind. Then I thought about the “mustache”-like facial appendages a lot of Asian dragons sport, so I gave him some and made them prehensile. I was pretty happy with that idea.

I had a lot of fun with the wrinkly skin on the face and the ridges of the crest.

As usual, I tend to zoom way the heck in and noodle away on details the average viewer will likely never see or notice, but that process makes me happy – and it’s also a bit of a compulsion – so I’m going to continue to do it.

One of the areas I struggled a lot with was the body scales. Obviously, elephants don’t have any. The skin of rhinoceros kind of looks plate-like sometimes, but it still didn’t look right. I ended up referencing the various scale patterns of alligators and crocodiles, which vary based on what area of the body they are. Lighting and shading the scales was very tedious.

I knew I wanted some kind of spinal ran or ridge, but it took me a while to figure out something that looked cool to my eye. I wound up heavily referencing the thicker plates on the backs of alligators and crocodiles, and ran a stereotypical dragon sail down the middle. Once I rendered everything with a “generic” light source in mind, I added some more directional lighting and shading with separate layers. I’m pretty happy with the results. It is definitely a technique I’m going to explore more in other illustrations.

No, I did not hand draw all those blades of grass. I spent a few hours and made a custom brush to do it. I drew a couple of grass clumps, as well as 13 individual, unique blades of grass, and turned it all into a brush. I made the brush black and white (but the colors can be changed during use), but I’m now thinking I should go back and add a little rendering, as I did have to hand paint all the shading. It still saved a bunch of time and will be potentially useful in other work.