Planning a Naga - How to draw a monster?

The weather is gorgeous, and I have two days off work this week! Woohoo! I'm going to tackle my next drawing challenge - Wetcanvas' Creature Feature - a Naga. A Naga is a mythological creature, usually seen with a female head and torso, and a serpent tail from the waist down. It has the ability to change form either fully human or fully serpent.

I am not at all experienced at drawing a make-believe monster, or planning out how I want it to look! The links on the Wetcanvas Creature Feature forum lead to images of statues, the Naga creature appears to be depicted as a many headed snake, and I really fancy having a go at that. I will need reference photos of snakes, especially angry looking snakes. I want to do individual heads all looking angrily at the person viewing the picture.

Looking at some other artists work to get ideas as to how they do their monsters, I was looking at Marc Scheff's website, and found this image of a "Scorilla". Not only is it an awesome and imaginative creature, but I noticed he gave it a background that it seems to fit into. So I think rather than just do a dark background, I could do with thinking about where my creature is likely to live, where will it be found? My first thought is a D&D dungeon, though it could also be in the water.


Another artist whose great at doing Monsters is Christopher Burdett, a couple of his images really caught my eye, Galog Bullfrog and Post Apocalyptic, both are action shots that appear to tell a story, and both have extra characters in them you either feel sorry for, or will to fight and overcome the monsters in the images. I would like to include another character in my image, but I'll have to see how I can fit them in. I'm thinking of doing the image in colour pencil on A4 paper (English Letter Size), not sure how much room that will give me to do detail on the secondary character. Although having said that, Christopher Burdett managed to fit his extra characters in easily, although I don't know what size he was working on, probably digital so I guess the size doesn't count the same on the computer!

I'll also need to come up with a pattern on the snakeskin, either similar to that of a real snake, or one made up. I might use a real snake's pattern but change the colours - I quite like the greens and yellows from the first picture of a Naga at the top of this post. :)

This picture is definitely going to be a challenge, but again looks like it will be good for me to improve my skills! Any help or advice anyone can offer would be gratefully received!

Triffid - Finished?

Here's what I have now! I have darkened it a lot, and it does look more improved. I'm wondering if I should call this finished or do some more work on it? So I'm going to allow it to sit for a bit while I figure out what to do next! Besides, I find when I've just finished working on something I never think it's that good - then after a while, I look back and think it's turned out much better than I thought it had!

Please let me know what you think! Constructive Criticism very welcome! :)

Triffid - WIP

Taking part in a Wetcanvas Challenge, I've started by doing a yellow crocus in coloured pencil, and now it seems to have evolved into a Triffid! As always, just click the image below for a larger version:

It's not finished yet, still needing some more layers and a darker background, but this is what it looks like so far - I hope you like!

Art - Teaching Myself

"Frozen in the Moonlight"

I am a self-taught artist, and still in the process of improving my skills. You can see a sample of my art in the header of this blog, plus some of my works I have uploaded here. Just click on an image to see a larger version of it.

"Gargoyle"

"House"

"Spider"

I haven't done much drawing in a while, I like pencil and colour pencil art - that's what I do best. I'm just not skilled with a paintbrush, probably due to a little too much playing and paint fights in school for me to learn much!

I want to be a fantasy art, I was first inspired by Boris Vallejo, I got a calendar of his back in the 90's, and it kicked off the fantasy art bug in me. I've since sought out new fantasy artists to add to my inspiration, I moved on to the works of Chris Achilleos, Luis Royo, Clyde Caldwell and Greg Horn. I would love for my meagre art talents to reach these standards, then I would be so proud of my work!

So what do I need to do to improve? All the above artists tend to focus on people in their artwork, very realistic figures. My figure drawing leaves a lot to be desired (in my humble opinion), and I want to be able to do amazing and realistic figures. I also don't have a lot of experience doing fantastic creatures, monsters or dragons. I would also love to do more backgrounds to my images, so landscape, and most especially cityscape, I would love to improve on. The simple answer to this - Practice! Now I've figured out what I want to imrove upon, I need to find reference images for these types of images, and practice them over and over again until I improve! So here's a simplified list of what I want to improve:

- Figure Drawing
- Fantastic Creatures, Monsters & Dragons
- Landscapes (Greenery)
- Cityscapes (Buildings & Architecture)
- Still Life (Weapons, Fantasy Objects)

For the fantastic creatures, monsters and dragons, I will need to collect reference images of animals, both furry and reptile animals, to be able to draw fantasy creatures. Once you can draw realistic normal animals, you can learn to draw fantasy animals really well. I've added still life as it occurred to me I don't have hardly any practice of drawing weapons, and the few I have done, have not been very good at all. So it's time to improve on them as well.

If I stick to this plan with my art, and work on these various subjects, by the end of this year I should be able to do these subjects with much greater ease, and be much more able to produce high quality fantasy art of my own. Wish me Luck!