There Be Dragons!

I decided to try my hand at a dragon drawing contest. The contest was for author Julie Kagawa's upcoming book Talon. There weren't many limitations on the contest save for the dragon drawings had to be the artist's original idea.

You can find the link to the contest below:

http://juliekagawa.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-draw-dragon-contest.html

While I'm very excited for the book I was equally excited to try my hand at drawing a dragon because I have very, very limited dragon drawing skills. Limited as in I've drawn a dragon once before. Five years ago.

Either way, my goal was to draw a majestic beast soaring through the air! What came out was a baby vegetarian dragon. Yes, that's right. As soon as I placed pencil to paper this vegetarian dragon emerged along with a gaggle of fearful veggies! His name is Tuft and he, apparently, wanted out of my head. To be fair, I didn't even know he was in there. Tuft is now a mainstay character who I've sketched and doodled numerous times now! Behold his fierceness:

Sketch after sketch of Tuft I decided it was time for color. Below is my final submission for the contest:

Tuft even has a story. He's an overachiever, but I wont share it here quite yet. Anyways, I hope you all enjoy Tuft!

<3 Kate

Grad Project - Identity

Well, so far so good! The school year is four weeks deep and - knock on wood - it's been as awesome as I anticipated! Ideally I'll have some work from the kiddies up soon, but since I only see each class once a week projects tend to be a slow process.

Instead, I'll entertain you with my Graduate project! This semester I have to complete three projects around a theme. The first theme was Identity, and I took it very literally. To be fair, I ended up a week behind because I, uh, accidentally signed up for a thesis class and went to that class the first week. Whoops! Needless to say I was a bit over my head. There will be no thesis for at least a year!

Anyways, I created a three-piece Identity project that very literally portrays me in three different scenarios.

1) Calm contentment. I love clean lines, even spacing, and general tidiness, but there is always some sort of idea or mess creeping in...

2) Sometimes my brain feels maxed out with all my ideas. It gets cluttered pretty easily up in the old noggin'.

3) Panic! There's a mess! Things are scattered! Everything that can go wrong has! Ah!

While spilling and splatting were fun and liberating it certainly isn't my cup of tea, but I still enjoyed the process of this project! For the third piece I actually wound up intentionally ripping a side when I mounted it to really reinforce the "messy" feel. Like I said, it's very literal, but either way I think it conveys my Identity pretty well; even down to the superficial things like my favorite color is purple!

Enjoy!

<3 Kate