Check out my "you can draw" page for the full pep-talk and demo of how bad I used to be.

 SPark's second rule of drawing is this: when you begin a picture you need to draw lighty! You will make mistakes, I can gaurantee it, and if you've drawn with you pencil lead pressed to the paper at full force, you will regret it later! I have drawn things dark here only because the scanner won't pick it up well otherwise, and I want you to be able to see what I've done clearly.
 
 

Ok, now that we know that, let's look at what we need to do first. I always start drawings with a light skeleton sketch. You can see here how you put down a few simple lines that define the basic proportions of the dragon. Again, I can't emphasize enough, draw lightly! Now, I generally start with the head. It doesn't matter if it is exactly circular or not, you'll change it later anyway. All of this is just to start with. From there, you curve a long snaky line around until you think it's long enough. Tyr to curve it in the same general places that I have, because all of the curves except the ones in the tail represent shapes ont the body such as shoulders, waist and hips. Then you'd want to add the lines for the chest area and the circle for the hips. Place them carfully, too low or too high will mess up the proportions, thought you can get away with odd proportions in a dragon better than in almost anything else. After all, no one knows for certain what a dragon really looked like. Next you add the lines for arms and legs, and the circle and line indciations for fingers and toes. Be sure that you look at the feet carefully. I was drawing lightly at first and erased it, so you can't see it, but the farther foot on the dragon used to be lower than the nearer. That is a big no no, it makes your dragon look very odd. Also, be careful of the wings. there is a tendancy to want to draw the lines for the long wing bones so that they converge at the far end, and also to squash them so they don't run off the page. Running off the page is just fine. In fact, if the dragon's wings don't at least touch the edge of your paper, then it's probably too small. Ok, once that is all done, it's time to move on to the next step.

The next step is to flesh out your skeleton. You want to add lines around all of the skeleton lines to make the dragon two dimensional. Three-D effects will come later. This part is harder than the first step, and doing the fingers and toes is particularly difficult. Look closely at the proportions I have here. There is a tendancy to go to extremes, either you make your dawings thick and muscle-bound, or to have drawings that are only slightly thicker stick figures. You want to keep to a middle ground most of the time, except when you're deliberately drawing a stick thin dragon, or a huge muscly one. You'll notice that I broke my own first rule and drew darkly, so that in the neck area particulary you can see a number of mistakes. You still need to draw lightly at this point. Another tendancy is to put the neck line on the bottom so that it comes out the back of the dragon's head. This will make the dragon look something like an ostrich, or an anorexic giraffe. The neck line comes out from the bottom of the head, not the back, and the upper neck line comes out of the top. You can, if you look closely, see the original skeleton in this drawing, and this will help you see how I added to it.

the third step is the easiest. Here's where you add detail. This is where all the spikes, barbs, horns, and other fun things go on. This is also the step where you add your basic muscle marks. you still need to draw lightly, especially when putting the muscles on, because as you add color, (or if you're doing black and white, as you add shading) lines that are too dark will mess up your colors, and distort your shadows. I've added stripes to this dragon because when you're putting in the color and shading, you need to take special care with stripes or spots. This way I can show what needs to be done to get them to look right. Now that you've got this done, you need to decide, if you haven't already, whether you want this to be a black and white drawing, or a color. There is a separate page of instructions for each.