Days like today it's nice to just relax outside a bit, maybe take a nap *yawn*...


PHEW this turned out WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY different than I was expecting...

I originally just wanted to try out screwing around with Krita... Well THERE'S A LOT TO FIGURE OUT!

Kinda started just going for it, grabbed the pencil tool and just started doodling.... But uhhh what to doodle? Well I'm sitting in a chair, maybe he can be doing that... Well maybe I'll just draw some relaxing scene...

Scraped together some rough draft, and then started drawing a layer with some more finalized lines... Jeez the head was wonky to do, I had to do a lot of thinking about how to angle everything, especially for the upward sideways look I was going for... I really should draw a reference page or something, this really made me understand a lot better why people are always making them haha... Hard to just make up stuff off the top of your head...

What else, the FEET... I see why artists always bitch about hands and feet... WHY ARE THEY SO HARD TO DRAW!!? Like arms and body were like whatever to draw, but the feet were kinda wonky to figure out... I think it's that they are just smaller more intricate parts maybe? Idk, all I know is that I CONVENIENTLY had the hands tucked neatly away behind Zenith's head ;)

I re-drew the butt thigh like 5 times, it was too small, and then too BIG, and then too small again....... I think it turned out ok in the end, although the hip indent looks a little extra detailed LOL, consistency is something I need to work on, I can see where I spent more time detailing things (head teeth thigh tail wings) and where I didn't as much (chest, feet, arms lol those little chicken forearms).

At some point when drawing the wings, I discovered the magic that is the LINE tool... So THATS how artists manage to get such clean looking lineart... WELL one wing drawn I realized I would have to LINE OVER EVERYTHING AGAIN if I wanted to have that crisp lineart look... I figure maybe that will be a next time thing... I also kinda like the sorta sketchy/shaky look that I ended up with.

Also, I looked crazy like the dog drawing everything by hand from Toniko Pantoja's hilarious video DIGITAL SKETCHIN, BRO!...

I heard that you should make lots of layers when drawing to make editing easy and whatnot, so figured I'd start just throwing different body parts in different layers. I had a head, teeth, tongue (that came at the end lol), tail, left and right wing, and right leg layer(s)...

This turned out to help a lot in the end, but I was SO CONFUSED when it came time to color everything... Like how tf do I fill these things???

Idk what I was expecting, I for some reason though that the program would just magically know to fill in the arms so the wings that are behind wouldn't bleed through... WELL NOT HOW IT WORKS. A lot of googling later, TRANSPARENCY MASK, what a cool thing, just blacken here and here and here, turn on the mask, and presto, now things look like what I was expecting lol...

Krita has this colorize mask tool, so you don't have to paint bucket fill everything, and that tool is fantastic! Used that for everything, made coloring so simple. And I don't have the wonky white lineart border showing up in areas I filled! Figured out that was because of the grow or whatever setting for the fill tool... That PENUP app I used before was muuuuch less sophisticated than Krita...

And one more thing with color... HOW DO ARTISTS DECIDE WHAT MEDIUM TO DRAW FOR?!? I didn't realize it would be an issue WHERE I was drawing... I drew everything on my OLED monitor, and then after I exported and looked at the image on my left monitor, which is an IPS monitos, WTF the colors were all super saturated!!!! Idk I never really notice it normally, but I guess it's because I was staring at this guy for like 8 hours, and probably weeks lol, the colors look super different on my IPS monitor... I ended up just accepting it lol, idk what the correct answer is there...

Then I had to do some googling for shading/shadows/whatever, which I figured out MUCH quicker than I expected, although I think I cheated a bit by remembering some video I saw months ago where someone was shading using the spray tool... Only had to watch one youtube video to get the gist of how to get the shadows going!

So I like had Zenith just like... MOSTLY sitting on a chair (left asscheek is like kinda falling off LOL)... Just sorta floating in the void... Should I draw a background.... Idk maybe just two colors...

Well somehow that turned into sitting on a roof somewhere with some mountains off in the distance, and some weird railing there too... And man oh man, those mountains are hideous, which is why they are extremely blurry! Something looks like a stick figure drawing? EASY SOLUTION, JUST BLUR IT lol...

Oh and what was the very last thing I did?... Well besides the signature which I almost forgot lol... THE TONGUE haha, I kept thinking the yawn looked kinda weird, and then I thought about how my dog yawned years ago, and remembered his goofy long-ass tongue curling in a funny way as he yawned, so a quick google reference pic later, and blam, tongue layer added lol. Went forked, gotta have that forked tongue on a reptile heh...


AAANYWAYS, let's see, some final thoughts... I liked the way the tail turned out, the way it plays with the chair was fun... Head wasn't bad, I REALLY like how the ear looks, I just kinda threw that together, and I think it fits kinda nicely, horns were kinda cool too (although not sure if i wanna add in striping again like last picture...).

What should I work on... Lots of things, but lets see, anatomy for sure, detail consistency, maybe colors a bit, idk if I like the body/wing colors, I made them different, but the wing ones kinda look a little weird idk... Background is UNINSPIRED lol, I literally probably threw that together in like 30 mins to an hour, so gotta do more there... Probably because my current motivation is drawing this dragon dude, so everything else is kinda just whatever at the moment haha...

CHANGES I want to make... Lots of Zenith design stuff... I kinda want to add a color gradient that changes in like segments from the underside of the maw, to the tip of the tail, following the gold area... Idk, maybe it will go from a kinda bright gold/yellow at the head to a darker golden brown by the time it gets to the tail? Would make him look more interesting... Design is kinda bland at the moment IMO...

I want to add HAIR, I saw some furred dragons while drawing this, and they just look so cool, plus if I ever do something fursuit related with him, those elements would translate over pretty well I think... I'm thinking some hair on the head for sure, and maybe on the tail tip... Not sure if it would go down the back maybe? Need to brainstorm this a lot more...

FEET (paws?), they need work... You might notice that they are facing away from the viewer, mostly because the angle was hard for me to conceptualize lol, but also because idk what I'm doing with them exactly yet... I think I DEFINITELY want some beans there though, toe beans are CUTE, gotta have them... Even if reptiles don't have them, whatever, they are AWESOME, need them!

Clothes? I pretty early on figured I wasn't gonna have any... Probably gotta learn how to draw them eventually though lol. I came across this funny uhh flutter? Idk what you call bluesky versions of tweets lol, ANYWAY, it was from  Meezer
"The times you draw reaaaaally nice anatomy.......... and then you cover it up with tons of fabric.... 😿 Then you sit there saying why can't this be porn or suddenly be nudists or in the most skin tight spandex."
I FEEL YA, I see why lots of people draw their characters naked, putting in this detail work on things and then throwing some heavy fabric over those details... CRIMINAL. (also go read her comic Synthetic Instinct, it's SO GOOD.)

Oh yeah, and I was thinking about throwing some dick and balls in there too lol, maybe another time before I make a foray into NSFW drawings... I was tempted though... Conveniently dragons/reptiles often slurp everything up inside themselves, so didn't have to draw in anything at all!!! Or maybe the goods are all crushed under those thighs, you'll never know 😈

So I guess I'm done yapping, kinda fun to just babble a bunch of text out, I think I might like writing... I'll have to work on being more concise LOL...

I do appreciate when artists write some personal thoughts every once in awhile, kinda cool to get an idea about what they are thinking about... I've definitely gotten my appreciation of something amplified because the author gave some insight into what was going on in their head as they drew their piece.

Oh, and the statistics in Krita say it took me 7 hours and 19 minutes to draw this... I thought it would have been MUCH longer considering how long I had this guy up between sessions of playing Satisfactory... Uhhh I drew using the Krita app on Windows.... And I used a Wacom One tablet (the cheap one that has no screen), which was surprisingly easy to get used to... When I wasn't misplacing my cursor...

Anyway, thanks for viewing if you see this? And sorry for babbling forever haha... Hopefully more to come, this was fun!