Let's draw a dragon!

Dragons are fantastic creatures that are present in different mythologies all over the world. Described as a mixture of different animals, the most common being: lions, snakes and bats. these beings have inhabited the imagination from the earliest times. In this tutorial I intend to teach you the process of building the body of a dragon with 2 wings and 4 legs using basic shapes.

 

Importantly, studying the shape of other animals helps a lot in the process of drawing a dragon, and the use of visual references is always recommended for best results. I also recommend that you already have a prior knowledge of drawing basic three-dimensional shapes like spheres, cubes and cylinders as they will be an important part of our dragon's foundation.

That said, let's get started!

 

1-The proportion and construction of the body

 

 

As with the drawing process for many other animals, it is important to have a general sense of the distance and height between our dragon's head, torso and hips.

 

1.1-In this tutorial we will draw a dragon with a long neck and long tail . For that we will create a grid like the one specified below with 6 rectangles on the page.

1.2-Next, we will draw 4 ellipses of different sizes, they will form the snout (yellow) the head (red), the trunk (green) and the hip (blue) of our dragon;

You may have noticed that there is a lot of space left at the top, this space will be used when building dragon wings;

 

1.3-Note that the ellipse that will form the dragon's trunk is considerably larger than the hip ellipse, while the ellipse that will form the muzzle is approximately half the size of the head, after establishing the distances, you can erase the grid;

 

1.4- Now draw a curved line that connects the top of the ellipses, this line should represent the general shape of the dragon's column, so it extends to the tip of his tail;

 

1.5- now connect the base of the ellipses to form the line that will represent the dragon's neck and belly

2-The head

The construction of the dragon's head.

 

2.1- start with two ellipses of different sizes, they don't need to be perfect circles, just an organic circular shape in general;

 

2.2- Draw two lines describing the three-dimensional shape of the sphere, breaking the sphere in the vertical and horizontal axis, this will help you to better locate the components of the head and better understand its structure;

 

2.3- from the smaller sphere draw 3 lines that will unite the two spheres, note that the top and bottom lines pass through the larger circle, this will be useful when creating the planes of our dragon's face;

 

2.4-Using this structure as a guide, start to better define the dragon's head, you don't need to follow the lines precisely, they only exist to help you in the construction process;

sketch where you want to draw the eyes and nostrils, notice that in the example the line of the mouth follows the curvature of the smaller circle.

I also further define the muzzle with a line to separate the different planes of the face;

 

2.5- Now add the details and better define your dragon's head, in this case, in addition to detailing the shape of the eyes and adding horns, I tried to increase the size of the mouth, create a kind of beak and leave the dragon's chin and jaw with harder and straighter shapes, but you're free to set different features for your dragon's face;

You can use this technique to draw the head at different angles, here is an example of how to apply the spheres to draw the dragon's head from the front:

3- Legs & Paws

 

To understand the proportion between the different areas that make up the dragon's arm, try to study animals in real life, felines in general are good references for dragons;

 

3.1- Using the base of the body we built before, draw curved lines at the beginning, middle and end of the trunk ellipse;

 

3.2- from the top of the middle line, create the base structure of the dragon's paws; each circle represents a joint; note that planes, triangle and distorted rectangle were chosen to represent the base of the dragon's paw, this will help us build the toes;

 

3.3- using the lines as a guide create basic shapes to represent the different parts of the dragon's arm; at this stage you can better define your fingers;

 

3.4-Using this base, try to better define the claw toes and the general shape of the paw; take the opportunity to add details such as spines and muscle lines;

You can follow the same logic for the hind legs, with the difference in the proportion of the parts, which will use the hip circle with a guide for the first joints:

4-Wings

Now that our dragon has an almost complete body, let's make a brief study of the wings and their structures.Dragons can have different types of wings: From the classic bat wings, passing through the wings with feathers, insect wings or even no wings. In this tutorial we're going to focus on bat wing structure, in the open and folded positions.

To better study the structure of the wings, let's first draw them open.

 

4.1- Let's start by creating a basic structure of trunk, hip and arm to be the base of the wing;

Note the use of a pentagon to represent the palm, this shape is useful as it allows each tip of the pentagon to become the basis for a different finger;

 

4.2- from each end of the pentagon, draw one of the fingers of our wing, each finger, with the exception of the thumb, which is on top, has 3 articulation points, this helps the wing to have flexibility, also note that the fold of the arm in the wing, equivalent to the bat's elbow, so there's no bone there;

 

4.3- Connect the fingers, wrist and shoulder with sharp curved lines to create the wing membrane. Notice that it ends somewhere near the hip circle.

Take the opportunity to create the shapes of the arm itself;

 

4.4- Make the finished line, adding details of claws on the tips of the fingers and defining only parts of the structure of the fingers;

To create the folded wings we are going to try to imagine the wings as if it were a human hand folded backwards.

Note that we still use the same pentagon shape to dictate the distance between the fingers that make up the wing.

The rest of the process is very similar to the previous one: general structure of the arm, followed by the structure of the fingers, the definition of the general shape of the wing with well defined curves and lastly the final detailing;

Now that our dragon has wings its only missing a tail

5-Tail

To make the dragon's tail we are going to use ellipses to create an illusion of volume. So we don't have to worry about making a curved bottom line perfectly aligned with the top line

 

5.1- first define the shape you want to give the tail, in this case I lengthened and twisted the column line a little, to give a better idea of ​​flexibility

 

5.2- Create ellipses that follow the natural shape of the tail, note that using ellipses makes it easier to visualize the tail curvature point

 

5.3- Outline the tail using the ellipses as a guide

 

5.4- define the final shape of the dragon's tail;

5-Tail

To make our dragon design even more interesting, let's add horns and some tail details;

 

This is my favorite part of drawing dragons because you can make all kinds of creative decisions.

 

Here are just a few examples of horn patterns and details I like to do.

 

6-Horns and Details

and now our dragon is complete!

It is important to remember that dragons can have various shapes, colors and designs and the focus of this tutorial is to help those who are starting to draw dragons now. Serving as a basis to , from this logic of building three-dimensional figures,help people to create all types of dragons.

 

Thank you for your attention and let´s draw more dragons;