A Guide to Drawing Dragons!

Drawing dragons is something fantasy artists will come across in their careers or hobbies. As such, learning how to draw a dragon is a difficult subject that challenges your artistic foundation and ability to be creative.

Unlike subjects where you can reference from real life, dragons do not exist in the real world. That means you have to be very good at understanding existing animal forms and artistic techniques for bringing your creation to life.

Thankfully, all the lessons on this site up to this point should have prepared you with a good artistic foundation to work from.

Unless directed by a patron, the best way to start would be to figure out whether your dragon’s form is humanoid, serpent like, or animal like in nature.

Use the form you are the most strong at to help you practice drawing dragons.

1. Gesture drawing and form

Since I am most comfortable with the humanoid form, I decide to draw my dragon in this method. During this phase, I am simply doing a quick gesture sketch.

I pick up the form and muscle groups from the human body and manipulate it to form the general body. Then I added the wings and tails later to the picture.

The wings are straight off my tutorial on drawing demon wings. So if you need a refresher, just hit up that lesson on how to draw the wings.

I’ve also included a simple foreground to reinforce the idea of what my dragon will interact with. On your dragon sketch, you should think about elements that you feel comfortable drawing in your gesture sketch.

2. Separating and smudging

This step requires a bit of organizing on your part. You will need to decide on how you want to split your gesture sketch into layers that work best for you.

I have duplicated my gesture sketch layers three times. In each layer, I erase parts of the sketch to isolate that part of the composition I am working on.

For example, in one layer, I erased the wings, tails, and foreground to isolate the dragon’s body. In the duplicated layer right below it, I erase the main body and the foreground to isolate the wings and the tail.

You may have to repeat this several times to isolate the needed layers. This will help you in the long run with creating paintings that are always easily editable should you change your mind about the composition.

Once all your layers are separated, start smudging your composition to reduce the amount of gesture lines and to increase shading details.

Don’t forget about muscle flow points when you smudge!

Once that is done, erase excess lines or shadings to define the shape of your dragon. Repeat for any additional layers that need refining of the overall shape (such as the wings or foreground).

Then, patch up any ‘holes’ in the composition so that all the shapes are nice and solid. You can do this by creating a layer underneath it, painting it at 100% pressure, and then merge it with the shape layer.

3. Adding details

Now that most of the shading for your dragon is done, you can start working on the tiny little details.

For the scales, switch to a smaller brush and begin painting patterned dots on where the scales are located. It can be time consuming but it will create a believable skin texture for your dragon.

If you like, work on any additional details that will bring your dragon to life. You may want to exaggerate the scale bones coming out of the back.

You can even add additional bones or frills coming out of the head and wings to give it a more dynamic look.

For the foreground, there is a trick to getting the rock details placed in. Rather than painting every single detail, what you can do is paint just a few details and duplicate that layer.

Then, resize that layer and merge it back to original rock layer. Each time you duplicate and deform the layer, you are compounding the amount of details with very little work.

Repeat this step for as often as you like.

When you have all the details in place, the last step, in drawing dragons, would be to bring your dragon to life with a few shadowing and lighting techniques.

4. Final touches for drawing dragons

In the final steps, you will add depth to it by creating cast shadows and highlighting where the light will hit.

Since your dragon and all its parts are on separate layers, this should be an easy task. You can either preserve the transparency of the layer (and paint in all the light and shadows within the layer), or you can use a clipping mask.

It is like the option where you are preserving the transparency of your shape layer except you have a lot more control since it is actually another layer on top of the shape layer.

That means, with the clipping mask, you can paint on top of the shape layer without damaging the layer underneath.

Use clipping masks whenever you can to paint in all the cast shadows. Then, switch to a light color and gently glaze over the dragon to signify where the light is actually hitting.

You can add in an additional background to improve the composition. For example, the background rocks can be done just by taking the foreground rock layers and deforming it. Then, repaint the whole structure with a light color to depict distance.

You can even paint additional dragons, and blur them into place, to create a dragon community.

At the end, make sure to repaint any additional light and shadow elements, on the same or different layers, to merge all the colors together.

While it looks difficult, drawing dragons can be doable when you break it up into smaller segmented layers to play with.

I hope you enjoy this challenging lesson and I look forward to seeing the types of dragons you have drawn!

Didn't find what you were looking for? Use this search feature to find it.

I hope you liked (tweeted, and +1 too) this site as much as I liked building it!

Tweet