This day was spread out over a couple of painting sessions, to allow the paint to dry, but the underpainting took no more than a couple of hours, so I’m calling it a single day. I knew the dragon in the foreground would be lying on a slab, and I wanted to get its position before painting the stone. I did a couple of quick positioning sketches, and then to get the dragon’s shape properly I painted the main parts of its skeleton, which would give me the understanding of how its limbs, back and wings worked. The shoulder blades of a dragon are /really/ complicated. Once I’d worked out how I wanted it to be lying, it turned out that the legs were coming down too far, so I translated it using a slightly different colour for the bone, and then painted over the skeleton to put the dragon into its rough position. That was the first part of the ‘day’.

When I came back, that was dry enough to paint over, and I started with the rock so that both surfaces would be wet when I worked on them. I put a bit of white into the blue near the far edge of the slab to make it translucent. I made that rock pretty textured, meaning the one to the left might look wrong as they both dry, but if it does I can deal with that when I do the right-hand slab.

The dragon looks really cute – the angle of its jaw makes it smile. I don’t know if I like it, but the head’s not finished anyhow.

Further things to do: dragon kittens, the one up in the entrance, lots more rock, and completing the details on this dragon.