Drawing Dragon Heads


by Dee Dreslough (www.dreslough.com)

As I sat down to plan this tutorial, all I could hear were the words of my many art teachers and advice from other artists: There is no substitute for drawing a picture from the real thing. Then I thought, "Well, where the heck does an aspiring artist find a real dragon head to draw from?" Not finding a handy answer, I sculpted a little dragon head, took out my trusty digital camera (great new toy, btw), and created some reference source for you-all. They're not as crisp as I'd like, but they give a good example of lighting and form.

Choose the pose you like best, and practice sketching that head on paper - OR, use the digital image as the basis for a drawing of your own. You can load the image right into your paint program, and then paint over it.

However, the only way I know of to learn to draw the form of a head freehand, though, is to practice drawing from a model. If you own sculptures of dragons, draw them! Practice, practice practice, and then try to draw a dragon from the memory of drawing the sculpture. Do this again and again, whenever you're bored. If you do a drawing a day, I assure you, you'll improve in leaps and bounds.

Other tutorials that will help you with this lesson: Drawing Dragon/Animal Eyes, How to Shade a Dragon Drawing

Okay..enough pep talk. You're here to draw, so we're going to go from this:


to this:

First Step - drawing the basic forms

Once you're here, see my other tutorial on putting details on a dragon drawing



Source files in Self Extracting Zip format
(Just download this file to your hard drive and unzip it. You can then view each source piece with an image viewer or your web browser. They're all JPGs.)

All images (c) 1998 Dee Dreslough. Feel free to copy, distribute and use on your web pages however you like, though.