rowyn

This weekend, having finished the art card project, I found that I kept thinking about doing art anyway. By midday Saturday, I gave up and decided to work on a new picture. During my multiple art supply runs, I'd come across something called "Aquabord™". It's "Claybord™ textured", and appears to be a piece of the kind of board used to make clipboards (chipboard, maybe?) coated in some kind of clay. ursulav had sung the praises of clayboard before, so I was curious about it. This stuff was supposed to be for watercolors, and one of the things that annoys me the most about watercolors is the way the medium warps the paper. Well, this stuff clearly wasn't going to warp for anything short of being thrown in a pool for a couple of days, so I picked up a package of three 5"x7" boards.

5"x7" is four times the size of the art cards I've been working with. Huge!

I spent an hour or two looking at pictures of otters and references in DragonArt. At one point in DragonArt, J. Peffer illustrates the principal of giving your figures realistic-looking anatomy, but not by directly basing them on real animals. In so doing, she draws this adorable cat-dragon -- kind of a dragon-skin on top of a cat body. It's so cute! I kinda wanted to do that with this figure, but didn't.



The gigantic pale purple tree in the background is the trunk of the World Tree, so many miles away that distortion from the atmosphere turns it hazy and blue, the way distant mountains look on Earth. I tried to make it obvious that's what was going on by having a receding line of mountains in the nearer distance, but I'm not sure it works. I got the idea from an illustration haikujaguar did which had the World Tree trunk in the distance like this, and thought it was so cool I had to try it myself.

I scanned in the early sketches to, so those who like to see the process can ( click here to see them )