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The Creativity of Imagining Dragons

What does a dragon look like? Depending on where you live your description may vary. For example the European idea of a dragon is a fairly large, dinosaur like creature with a longish neck and huge wings that allow it to fly. Where as the oriental, Chinese style of dragon tends to be more serpent like in the body, retaining lizard like legs, but often does not include wings. The point being, you would still recognize both as being a dragon.

If you're ever stuck for something to get your creative juices flowing then imagining a dragon can be a useful exercise to pass the time. Think about everything you know about what a dragon looks like and then try to draw it. It's not as easy as you might think.

We all know the broad features that make a dragon recognizable to us but when it comes to filling in the details it can be quite a challenge. What does the mouth look like? Should a dragon have horns? What about the wings - could they be bat like or should they be more like pterodactyl wings? What type of dragon is it? Will it be land based or does it live in the water? Would a dragon that lives in the water need wings?

Whilst I haven't painted a lot of dragons through out my career I certainly have drawn many in numerous sketch pads. Dragons are interesting creatures and imagining one can really be a creative challenge.

Pictured artwork:

Blue Dragon, by TET
Acrylic on Canvas Stretcher
40 x 80cm (15" x 31"), November 2007
TET Life Topics:

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 13, 2007 3:43 AM

    I didn't know if this was your painting at first, as you didn't say in the blog. I only noticed the details at the end after I had clicked to enlarge the picture, and saw your signature on the painting!

    I think this is a marvellous painting, and to say that you haven't painted any dragons for ages! I don't think you will have any trouble selling it on ebay if that is what you intend to do!

    Will it be on your web site, as it isn't at the moment, so I have just saved the enlargement to my comp in My Pictures for my slideshow? (as I did with the photo of you with your cards - a slight resemblence to Michael. J. Fox, but wouldn't have thought of it if you hadn't said!)

    You should definitely put this onto gifts too, and prints, as the dragon lovers will love it! If you still have your previous dragon sketches, you could perhaps do a video showing them along with the feature of the artwork.

    When you next come to WA in Feb, you should take a photo of that dragon's head ornament to show on your web site or show in the video, though, that's a long time to wait to do a video with the sketches etc, but it could go somewhere, it's worth a viewing, especially if you say how old you were when you did it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. TET (David Arandle)November 13, 2007 10:32 PM

    This artwork will be on my web site early next week (when it goes onto ebay). This post was mainly an excuse to preview it but I had thought of doing a video on this posts subject too.

    I was going to show quite a few of my dragon sketches and, of course, the dragon's head you mentioned too (I could easily reuse the video footage I already have of it - which is actually much longer than the half second you saw in the video it appeared in).

    I will be putting this design onto products too, though the dimensions don't lend themselves to many products - it's too thin - which is unfortunate because I quite like this size of canvas.

    ReplyDelete

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