Fight for life

Taking a break from ideas for wolf poses for =WhiteSpiritWolf's aceos, I decided to practice digital coloring again for a bit. I had a neat sketch of this picture lying around, because I found the sketch alone too boring and bland to upload. But I was really happy with it and liked the idea, so maybe some color would make it upload-worthy. And it kind of did? I'm not sure. I still think my digital coloring needs a lot of improvement. But you have to start somewhere, right?

I like scenes like these. There are too many "posed" dragons in my gallery, in my opinion. It's just a dragon in front of an empty background. I need to improve drastically on action scenes like these and landscape backgrounds. That's what I'm planning on doing the next few months.

I wasn't too sure if celtic shields were strapped to the arm of the warrior. Now that I think about it, they probably weren't and the men just had to carry them around. I made a mistake there, because I drew it in a way that would suggest it was strapped to the arm with leather strips or something like that. Just mentioning this, so people won't think that arm just disappears into the shield X)

Also, I wanted to draw a really sleek, raptor-like dragon because I thought it would be a likely enemy to encounter while traveling somewhere on foot, unlike a giant flying monster (unless you're the dovahkiin, of course). This idea made me try to draw the limbs of the dragon really long and thin. That's the reason why the arm in front may look a little stretched. I think it worked pretty well, actually.

During the process of sketching this, I kept thinking the right arm and hand of the warrior were a bit too small, but then I took a few reference photo's of my own arm and torso and remodeled it after that. The result was more or less the same. So I guess I did it right somehow. It is foreshortened a bit, since the arm is slightly behind the torso, that is true. So I guess it's not that weird if it appears somewhat smaller.

I recolored the hair and beard of the warrior three times X) They were blond at first, then a dark type of brown. But I wanted something more red, so I made it red. But that was too red so I mixed in some brown. And the result is what we see here. I tried to color with an analogous palette.

Media used: mechanical pencil, GIMP