Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Whimsical Cat Art Prints by TET (Redbubble Store)

Slide 1
Slide 2
Slide 3

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!
Relax and Challenge Yourself with a Fun, Whimsical Cat Art Jigsaw - 30-1000 pieces. Click Image for More.

Popular posts from this blog

New Cat Art Collaboration: TET's Cats Paintings and OpenArt AI Model Workspace (Photobooth)

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

"Ya Mum Reads it..."

You'l find my own Photography in this blog too. Quite a while back I did a survey that tells you what kind of audience credibility your blog has. I'm not sure what the score was but I do remember the commentary which boiled down to "Your mother reads your blog regularly but you probably don't have much wider appeal". Fuck you survey! (Hi Mum, sorry for cursing! I do appreciate you reading, really I do!) I don't know how many regular readers I have, if any, but I do know, on average this blog receives more than 4000 page hits per month, much of it coming from search engines like Google. Perhaps of some interest is my new current top search entry point of all time, people looking for Bert and Ernie,  who I wrote some commentary about when it was officially announced that the Sesame Street Characters were not gay . Which is quite a departure from Krippin Virus from a few years back when the movie I am Legend came out. The thing about this blog is t...
8 comments
Continue Reading »

TET Artwork Diary: Nansen The Cabin Boy's Cat of the Belgian Sailing Ship, RV Belgica, Trapped in an Antarctica Winter, 1897

Belgica in the ice. 1897. Photo: Adrien de Gerlache   Y ou wouldn't ordinarily think of cats and penguins together in the same image but that's what I found myself creating when thinking of an idea for my next painting. I have painted penguins before as part of my Australian Animals series from the early 2000's, and I have a couple of cartoon  penguins (that you can see in a very old post, Designing Formal Penguins ) I created for a Yeti skateboard graphic, so, I didn't just randomly think, 'penguins'. Recently I had a revelation about my art, in that I don't simply paint pictures of cats, I paint 'relationships'. Almost all of my paintings of cats feature two or more cats, or a cat with something, such as a butterfly, bird, fish, goat... and why not a penguin? However, I didn't want to just paint some random cat with some random penguin. I wondered if there was ever any real cats in history that may have a reason to meet a penguin? Turns out, on...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Movie Review: Project Hail Mary (2026) *No Spoilers*

T his wasn't a movie I particularly wanted to see even though it's right in my wheelhouse, realistic Sci-fi. However, after Project Hail Mary did so well in theatres it became a movie I wanted to check out once it reached streaming. In this case I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. It wasn't really on my radar because, on the surface, it's not anything I haven't seen before, even quite recently. Lone astronaut goes on some kind of mission, mission fails, astronaut tries to salvage the mission and somehow finds a way home. However, in my opinion, what makes this film different is in the detail. There are a lot of often seen tropes here presented in new ways, that may capture your imagination. The movie opens with science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), waking up from deep sleep on a spaceship, far from Earth, with no memory of why he is there. Presumably a side effect of basically being put in storage while the spaceship travels across vast distances. From the...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Embarrassing Yourself with Doof Doof Music

Ever since Spinal Tap popularized the notion of turning an amp up to eleven audio systems have been rising to the challenge of louder, more awesome sound. In particular, car audio systems have embraced the notion of the bigger the noise the better the sound must surely be. What I'd like to know is, if these sound systems are so good, why do they make all music sound the same... Doof, Doof, Doof? You've all heard them. Pimped up cars, with audio systems seemingly worth more than gold, volume blasting way past eleven. Sound waves booming long before you make a positive visual on the car... Doof, Doof, Doof. It has to be the audio system right? Surely all these people can't be playing the same tune? Doof, Doof, Doof. Could it be that the more money spent on a car sound system the less musical range it will actually play? Maybe these people can't afford to buy music after purchasing the audio system so they all play the same demo track? Doof, doof, doof. In my own car I hav...
14 comments
Continue Reading »

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) *No Spoilers*

T his is the first time in quite a while we've seen a live action Spider-Man that is, essentially, a fully formed, grown up superhero, fighting crime on his own terms rather than looking to mentors to guide him.  In  Spider-Man: Brand New Day  it's four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home . No one knows who Peter Parker is but Spider-Man has become a local legend, helping to keep New York free of crime. Personally, Peter is still struggling with not reconnecting with his former friends, whose lives are again put at risk when a new foe crosses his path. If you're a fan of Tom Holland's Spider-Man films, and the MCU in general this film should not only not disappoint, you may even consider it to be one of the best MCU films you've seen in a while. I really enjoyed all the quick cameos by small time Spider-Man villains even though I don't know many of them. Their inclusion really started to broaden the scope of the character, despite this installment ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »

Review: ArtHelper - The All-In-One AI Writing + Marketing Assistant for Artists - 'ChatGPT for Artists'

ArtHelper prides itself on being all 'human-made' art. T he idea of an AI, trained specifically on art business marketing, that can not only offer advice on marketing your work, but also assist with creating all the content too, is certainly appealing. Especially to those of us who would rather spend more time creating our art than trying to sell it. ArtHelper does just that whilst attempting to be your 'home' on the internet. A destination for your profile and portfolio, a marketplace for your art, and a directory of artists as well, with one distinction - all the art must be human made. Which, for you AI artists, doesn't count the prompt for AI generated art - because the idea, according to ArtHelper's creators, isn't the art. Which is a fair point, in terms of promoting art 'made by a human', but can get kind of murky when you understand that not all AI art is generated from a single prompt... and 'found object art' isn't actually ...
Post a Comment
Continue Reading »