Ages and ages and ages ago my boyfriend asked me to paint a pretty cool picture of dragons in flight; I got started on it, then I was stupid and left it in a basement under a pipe, where the entire canvas was ruined due to water/rust damage. Lesson learned.

Last spring, to make up for it, I attempted to make him a giant dragon sculpture - the largest piece of art that my school's kilns could possibly accommodate - and it ended up breaking during firing, with only the head surviving. Numerous lessons about thermodynamics, ceramic structural integrity, physics, and structural design were learned.

So, a few weeks ago I was at work and I sketched this dragoness real quick, and then jotted down a few lines to mark off a vague background. When I got home I cleaned up the sketch and decided that it would make up for the dragon-painting and the dragon-sculpture.

I sat on the idea for a couple of weeks and tried to decide how I would finish it up. My gut instinct told me I should finish it traditionally with watercolor and colored pencil, but my comfort-level told me to take it into Photoshop. Photoshop makes me comfortable because I can always hit the "undo" button - watercolor doesn't do that.

I finally hit on the bright idea of scanning the sketch for posterity, and doing a preliminary digital painting that I could change easily.

That's what you see here. I didn't time myself on this, I didn't force myself to work too hard on any one part of the digital painting - I pretty much just did it so I could smoosh colors around to get a pleasing color-composition. So yeah, there's a few things I would change, and some things I don't like.

But that's kind of the point.

See, now I have the sketch saved on my computer and I could print it up any time I want - I could even re-paint over it in Photoshop - but I also have the original sketch, and that means that I can take the things I've learned in the digital piece and apply them to the picture in traditional medium. Sure some things will be different due to the nature of watercolor, sure I'll have to change some things to accommodate the watercolor - but it'll still be a good learning experience.

And in the end, isn't that what art is about?