Thursday Art Walk - Fruit Dragons!

In Which I Drew A Bunch of Thumbnails

I recently started following YouTuber DrawingWiffWaffles, and while I don't know that I'll ever be as good at drawing as her (I do not have boundless quantities of patience and discipline for my art, you may have noticed), I am hoping to apply a lot of her techniques to my own art. Hopefully, that'll help me improve so I don't just... stop after sketching a little.

One of the techniques I'm taking right now is thumbnailing - essentially messy sketches that you use to refine final drawings. I'm very bad at letting messy things stay messy, but hopefully, you can see the sketchy thumnailiness of the following images.

I'm also stealing a prompt list that DrawingWiffWaffles used. The list is by @SeaLemon on Instagram, and it's 30 days of Fruits. I did the first 5 below, but instead of just drawing fruits (which, in hindsight, maybe I should've started with...), I decided to make Fruit Dragons!

1) Watermelon

I really like the idea of a Watermelon Dragon for some reason. The smooth, green-striped outside of a melon is fairly herpetological to me, and I like the bright pinks and dark reds of the flesh, the white pith before the verdant rind, the glossy, dark brown or black seeds... the fruit looks wonderful, and designing things to look kind of like it is fun!

This is also where I settled on how I'd draw my dragons - the shape of the fruit determines the shape of the dragon! I used all ovals to lay out how this dragon looks, giving him half-oval watermelon slice wings and watermelon slice horns, half-watermelon feet, and oval floppy ears! I like his sweet yet derpy expression, too. I'm super proud of him.

2) Blueberry

This gal is a bit odd, you must admit. Circles are not very dragony, but I liked the idea of making an almost medieval-style two-legged dragon, but I might take her wings (which are supposed to look like the flower-end of a blueberry but instead look like weird grass...). I tried to make her more birdlike - pigeon-toed, kinda goofy, bipedal, and round-headed... but I don't like the profile view of her face. It looks terrrrrrrrrible. I honestly don't know what to do for a face on a round dragon, though. Do I give her an extra bubble-muzzle? That might work! I like the almost scorpion-like segmented neck and tail.

3) Pineapple

As far as positions go, I'm pretty pleased with the smaller version of Pineapple, but I like the way the wings are folded down on the laying-down version up top. I want the wings, horns, ears, tail, and toes to remind people of the green top to a pineapple, but I'm struggling with how to get across that classic pineapple shape on the body without making him... spiky. I'll figure it out. Kinda happy with how I got the rounded cylinders of the pineapple to go together to make the body.

4) Lemon

Lemon was maybe the easiest to draw - mostly because I didn't give it a tail and I've got it sleeping in a nest! I really like the "lemon at rest" idea, and I'll probably keep it, though I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to really make it obvious that this baby is a Lemon Dragon (besides body shape - look at that lil tail nub!). I'm thinking I'll make the wings lemon wedges and give him little lemon pip horn nubs. Besides that, though, I think that might be my design, right there - right down to the lil floppy lemon-shaped ears! I like this one.

5) Banana

Ugggggh. I Hate how I drew poor Banana Dragon. I wanted to have a more Asiatic Dragon in appearance but I ended up with a messed up Muppet reject. I'll have to thumbnail this a bunch more to get it to work, but I still like the idea. Maybe I'll just draw a bunch of bananas in different positions, then put them together in Paint.Net or something to make the outline? And from there, I'll make the actual dragon? But yeah, not happy with Banana Boy here At ALL.

Still, this was just the thumnailing stage. I still have the actual sketching, lineart, coloring, etc to do.

My plan is to compose the image so the fruit itself is visible somewhere, either as a background in and of itself or as a background element. Maybe Lemon Dragon has a few lemons laying around? Banana Trees for Banana Dragon to hide in so I don't draw so much of it? I love the idea of Blueberry Dragon maybe trying to peck at some blueberries that have been scattered on the ground like some sort of derpy chicken!

All in all, this is a fairly successful experiment, and if I don't make all 30 dragons, it'll be because I get distracted... probably by Inktober, let's be honest lol.

I hope today's blog gave you a break from the State of Things as the are today. It's been a rough 2020, and I'm ready for something better, even if better can be hard to hope for. All I can say is this: Keep making things that make you happy, and share them.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC