Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

How to shade a dragon drawing

Okay..this tutorial assumes that you know how to draw a dragon of some kind. This 'dragon' is actually a Dimar, the particular species I made up for a book I wrote, so if I refer to it as a dimar, just ignore me. :-) - Dee Dreslough from www.dreslough.com <-author and artist of this tutorial.

(Feel free to copy and redistribute this tutorial and it's art freely, but please mention me on the page and give a link back. Thanks!)

How to use the Tutorial

The pictures shown with each lesson are put at the bottom of the page. I recommend opening up your browser 8 times, and loading each page. It'll take quite a while for each picture to load, so if you have them all going at once, once you're done reading one lesson, it might already be loaded in the next lesson.

First, get a dragon drawing. Here's a simple block colored dragon head - you can use this dragon if you want, and you don't yet know how to draw a dragon head. Getting forms down will be my next tutorial. If you already know how to draw dragons, I figured you'd know how to fill in rough shapes in your drawings with the flood fill tool of whatever drawing program you use.

(The background was done with Photoshop, 'Render Clouds' with blue and black colors selected.)

Now, you can see that this picture doesn't really leap off the screen. It looks like it could be an animation cell - very flat.

We're going to bring it to this:

A little more exciting, eh? Let's get started! Click here to go to Stage 2 ->