Dragon is a creature you can find in a lot of different cultures and comes in all shapes, sizes and relationships with human beings. While there are differences, most dragon designs comes with common traits such as reptile-like faces, scales, limbs with sharp claws and wings.

 

Learn how to use the knowledge of human anatomy to draw dragons, plus trick and tips on how to draw dragons, paint scales and pose your dragon in this tutorial!

Dragon's Head Basics

When I studied how to draw dragons, I find it easier to get used to drawing dragon after I compared dragons to humans and made notes of their differences and similarities to us, humans.

 

Let’s see the differences between human and dragon faces.

From the comparison above, we can see that:

 

1. The shape of a dragon’s head is usually flatter compared to human.

2. Dragon’s eyes are a bit more to the side, as opposed to human’s centered eyes. This enables dragons to have a wider angle of view than human.

3. Dragon’s mouth has big enough opening to expose most if not all of its teeth, while human only have a small opening that expose front and some side teeth.

^ Human mouth vs dragon mouth with the blue lines to represent the jaws.

 

Other than those three, human and dragon’s eyes are different. Human eyes has the white parts visible, like the one shown below. But that’s not how dragon’s eyes usually look.

Dragon’s eyes are more similar to animals’, which don’t have the white part visible.

The white part in human’s eyes makes it easy to point directions with, but you can do the same with animals’ eyes albeit looking less obvious.

Drawing Dragon's Head

Designing a dragon’s head might seem daunting at first, at least, it was for me! I find it easier to draw the side view first for reference before I drew the dragon’s head in other angles.

 

There are three methods I used when drawing a dragon.

 

The first method:

1. Draw a circle and divide it by four.

2. Add a box outside the circle, the width is about 2/3 of the circle length for the nose and mouth. Roughly decide the angle, length and shape of the nose.

3. Sketch out the details and eyes.

4. Lastly, draw fine details and erase the guide lines. You’re done!

The second method uses silhouette. This might be the best way to trial and error because you’re nor burdened with details.

 

Draw the silhouette freely and add any shape you want to see. Then, trace it and flesh out the basic parts such as the eye, mouth and nostril. You can add details after, and done!

The third one uses simple shapes like box and triangle. Just add an eye, a dot for nose, the mouth line and add what makes the dragon unique and done!

Bonus: Drawing the head in different angles consistently.

 

First draw the reference in side view and top view. Then add grid lines to help map the facial structures.

Note: In case you’re not familiar with it, X axis = horizontal, Y axis = vertical, and Z axis = depth.

Use the grids as the base when you want to draw the dragon’s head. Sketch out the dragon’s head shape and finish it by adding details according to the reference.

Dragon's Body

Before you can draw a dragon’s body, you must be familiar with how it looks. Let’s take a look at a standard western dragon.

While there are obvious differences, like the shape of the head, wings and tail, human and dragon bodies are analogous. Let's do human-dragon comparison again!

Now, let’s list what we can find from the comparison!

 

1. Dragon has longer neck,

2. Dragon has stouter body and limbs, with a chest that naturally puffs,

3. Dragon’s limbs are naturally bend and shorter than that of a human (body to limb ratio),

4. Dragon’s feet natural state is the same with how a human feet looks when tiptoeing. The feet are also longer in length.

 

Aside from that, dragon’s tail flows the same way the spine does, touches the ground and only move from side to side. This is similar to most reptiles in a way the tail helps them balance their bodies.

Bonus: You can draw dragon front and back feet based on human’s hand and feet. Swap the fingers and toes for claws, make the bony parts obvious and adjust a thing or two to make it less human and more dragon-like, voila!

Horn and "Accessories"

For horn and “accessories” designs, the sky is the limit! You can add as many as you like, with any kind of shape you want and anywhere in the body—well, maybe except for the stomach and inner parts of the limbs.

For the head, start with a plain dragon head. Then you can throw in any kind of combination of shapes to decorate. From horns, fins, mane, beard, eyelashes until random shapes, I find that any design looks great on a dragon. The key is: the design should be drawn symmetrically.

Don’t let theme shackles you! For example, when designing a sea dragon, it’s natural to want to add fish styled designs like the one on the left, but any of the dragons below can become a sea dragon if you wish it to be.

 

Same goes for colors. The idea that sea dragon = blue or green, earth dragon = brown or fire dragon = red can work, but you can always unleash your creativity by using unusual colors. If anything, that could make your dragon memorable.

 

Back to the tutorial! Just like how we design the head, draw anything for the nape, spine and tail—anything can look good. I personally prefer not to draw anything on the spine, just in case a character needs a ride.

Note: if you want to decorate the spine, you might prefer your dragon’s spine curved outward. This is to give room so that the horn/fin/spike you draw doesn’t look uneven.

Wings

For animal that has wings, the wings are their hands! The most popular dragon wings are similar to a bat—which has a ton of similarities to a human’s hand.

Dragon’s upper arm is shorter than the lower arm, while human upper and lower arm are of the same length. While there’s no hard fast rule for the length difference, 1:2 generally work.

For the “finger” part, if we’re going to be faithful to the bat wings dragon’s wings is based on, the finger bone closest to the “palm” should far longer than the other two—about twice as long. But it’s okay to make them equal in length if you want to.

Remember that because the bones are inherently straight just like our finger bones. That’s why it’d look blocky instead of smoothly curved.

For the “thumb”, you can draw it in various styles. Almost anything looks great.

When posing, you can use the knowledge of “dragon wings and human hands are analogous” and use your hands as reference. Take note when posing that the “arm” of a dragon’s wing cannot be straight, unlike human.

By the way, I colored the inner part of the wings and the outer part differently for the sake of tutorial’s clarity. You’re free to use the same colors for both the inner and outer parts if that’s what you prefer.

Dragon Scales

Though there are creative variations for dragon skin designs—such as using fur or feathers,—dragon with reptile scales is pretty much the norm.

 

This is just my personal preference, instead of a flat scale I prefer a slightly curved one. The reason is because I can draw more dynamic shades with curved scales.

Drawing scales on the body is straightforward because the body shape of a dragon consists of simple shapes such as oval and circles. The key is to keep the contour of the body in mind when you draw the scales so that the scales won’t look flat.

Applying scales on the head is similar to the body in the sense you have to pay attention to the contour. In my case, dragon head has its own unique contour depending on the design. That fact makes it a bit trickier to add scale to the dragon’s head compared to the body.

If you want to be more detailed or realistic, you can add special scales on the eyelids and lips the way real reptiles usually have.

Painting Scales

Drawing the scales one by one would take so much time, so I made a scale pattern. You can download the pattern from the link below and use it for free!

Let’s start by using the scale pattern! Draw simple lines for the outline. For context, let’s pretend it’s a dragon’s neck.

Drag and drop the scale pattern to the canvas.

The blue part in the picture below is the supposed scaly part. Don’t erase the excess! We need it for the next step.

Considering dragon’s neck is tube-shaped, flat pattern would look unnatural. First rasterize the scale pattern layer. Then, go to Edit > Transform > Mesh Transformation. The number of horizontal and vertical lines used are 6.

Erase the excess parts.

On another layer, add details with Mapping Pen to make the lines to give it a hand drawn look. Then delete the thick outline. Merge the hand drawn layer and the scale layer. The outline is done.

To paint the scales, create a new layer below the outline layer and paint it with the base colors.

Create another layer above the previous one, Blending Mode Multiply. Using Transparent Watercolor brush, shade the sides of the neck.

Create a layer between the first layer and the shadow layer. Paint shadows underneath each scales to emphasize the gap between the scales. This will prevent the scales from looking flat. I used Mapping Pen for this step.

Create another layer under the previous one. This time paint individual scales to give it a curved look using Transparent Watercolor brush and Hard eraser from time to time to keep the edges sharp. Keep the lightning source in mind.

Create a new layer on top of other color layers, but beneath the outline layer. Highlight the scale with slightly colder color. The brushes I used were Transparent Watercolor and Dense Watercolor brush with a dash of Hard eraser.

It’s done!

Posing Dragons

When it comes to posing a dragon, it’s best to use either four-legged animals or winged animal as reference. But what about human?

 

Previously we talked about how dragon and human bodies are analogous to each other. And, yes, you can use human poses for your dragon!

 

There are things to take note though because dragon limbs movements are more limited than humans.

 

We can freely move our limbs inwards, outwards, up and down, but dragons can only move their limbs forward and backwards with limited outward-inward movements. The picture below show general movements a dragon can make, the longer the arrow the greater degree of movements and vice versa. Not to mention their limbs are shorter and naturally bend.

That’s why not all human poses can work. Poses that features outward movements can’t work on a dragon’s body.

On the other hand, poses that involves inward movements work well!

What about the wings?

 

Expressive human hand movements can be used for dragon wings since human hands and dragon wings are analogous. Since wings are flexible, you can convert most of human hand movements as dragon wings. Remember that you still need to pose the front legs, though!

Outro

I didn’t cover painting the dragon as a whole since it holds the same principles you use when painting anything else. As long as you know how source of light and shading works, the rest relies on your own painting style.

Scales, on the other hand, isn’t something commonly painted—hence it was covered to give you general idea on how to paint it.

 

I hope you find the tutorial useful and that you’re ready to create your own dragons. Have fun drawing!