"Smaugust" Week 1: Process and Commentary!

what's up subjectivist it's jack here a while ago we had I posted a poll on our YouTube community post and I asked you guys you know we're kind of busy this month and I asked you guys if you would be interested in seeing some of my process from my drawings for smuggest and for those of you don't know smuggest is a kind of a social media trend in the month of August artists will draw a different dragon every day and there are like prompt lists some people use prompt lists some people don't I'm using a prompt list by an artist named Anderson Carmen check him out on Instagram because he's doing this as well and like I said we're using the same prompt list so you can see what kind of different visual conclusions we've come to he works traditionally he works with pen and ink and his stuff is really cool so I suggest you check him out but yeah so um for for today I'm just gonna show you my first seven drawings for the first week of smuggest conveniently August the month of August started on a Thursday so every Thursday is going to have all seven of my dragons from that week so yeah here is the first week of smuggest and I'll be doing a little bit of commentary over all of my process work okay so the first prompt for day one was muscle so the problems can be pretty much anything sometimes they're adjectives sometimes they're nouns and you can interpret it a lot of different ways now what I love about drawing dragons is that there are so many possibilities for design you know they're fictional creatures but there really is no rule that says the Dragons have to look a certain way so you can kind of do whatever you want with them you can make them anatomical fantastical all sorts of different things you want to do with them so for muscle um I kind of went with the first idea that came into my head honestly and that was just this really big beefy almost gorilla looking kind of creature and I referenced a lot of animal Anatomy for this one all my dragons I referenced Anatomy but because this one was muscle and see here for a while I contemplated giving him sunglasses but I got rid of that but yet so since this was muscle I felt that was important that I actually referenced animal muscle anatomy so I looked at the the muscles of lions and gorillas for this and when I when I initially started coloring him I gave him this kind of Bowser color palette that I actually kind of wish I had stuck with that because I'm looking at it and I like that better than what I ended up with but then I just messed with the hue and I changed to that color and what you see me doing here now is I overlay a different layer for texture I just import an image and use that to give it a little bit more texture and that's just kind of an easy tip if you're working digitally and you use flat colors like I do when you want to give it a little bit more texture an easy thing you can do is just use a multiply layer and a clipping mask and you can overlay a texture of just like an image I just look up on Google Images like old paper texture and it kind of gives a little bit more texture almost kind of you know gives the impression of brushwork even though I just use the fill tool to place all my colors so that was day one that was muscle I like this guy he's one of my favorite ones that I did day two was son this is a really fun prompt I like this one a lot I had it in my head that I wanted to do something very day if ik there ëgod like with this kind of ethereal and less anatomical so I didn't use his must reference as much reference for animal Anatomy with this one but I did reference a lot of ancient Egyptian wall paintings and clothing because I thought you know Sun is a very important element of ancient Egyptian culture so I was like okay I can do kind of like a ancient Egyptian Sun God kind of thing with this one when I posted this one on Instagram I got a lot of comments saying that it looked like nickel bolas I think I don't know if right but it's a character from Magic the Gathering I wasn't familiar with it and when I looked it up I guess I found the old artwork of it which looks like this and I guess what they meant was this and I see that you knows very long kind of serpentine and slender and I really like that I like the idea of this kind of instead of like a big ripped God this kind of skinny gut it implies a little bit more of ethereal power instead of physical strength and obviously I kind of went for a straightforward gold color palette with this one what's kind of nice about these prompts is that you know it sort of forces you to kind of thing on your toes you have to come up with an idea every day so sometimes you know you kind of go with the first idea and that's alright because you can spend a little bit more time exploring the idea once you're in it and work a little bit more on your technical skills but it's a nice exercise in discipline because it forces you to make something every day and you don't get stuck in the concept stage for too long kind of just get something out there and you know just have it done by that day so yeah this was son I think this is the favorite my favorite one that I've done out of the ones that I've done so far I really like doing a lot of intricate details especially with like armor and stuff so it was fun to be able to do that I don't think I've done anything like that on any of my other dragons for this week so this one's kind of unique looking stands out and it was cool making these kind of like ethereal wings that really weren't that hard I just like I said I used the overlay multiply layer to add that kind of texture in color but yeah that's son very Egyptian I guess very Niko bolas if you will then day three was tiny and this is this is the first adjective prompt and sort of a noun prompt and you know I had a couple of different ideas with this one but I figured the easiest way was literally to just make it small on the canvas so my last two filled up the canvas one was muscle one was son when was a big buff dude the other was essentially a God so they filled up the whole canvas I was like right so for this one what if I just put him in the corner um so this time I was kind of experimenting more with my composition then with the actual design because you'll see this is pretty straightforward dragon design I'll go too crazy with it I tried to exaggerate his proportions if you want make something look smaller without giving it the context of other things in the scene especially it's a living thing one thing you can do is give it bigger arms and a bigger head and then a smaller body it kind of makes it more look like a child or you know a juvenile whatever and but it also it just makes a cuter and I think all of that is kind of part and parcel with with tiny so that's what I ended up doing I gave him this kind of big do if you look at head a little bit too big for his body and I gave him kind of a more reptilian body as opposed to other ones were a little bit more of a million switched his color scheme there to a pink again I wanted that kind of cuteness cuteness but like he doesn't think he's cute he's he's angry he'll set you on fire kind of like those little dragons from how to train your dragons I don't remember I don't know what they were called with the little little dragons that he was playing with yeah then I overlaid my textures and I had that I kept that big square that I had with the other ones to sort of emphasize again just how small he was on the canvas but I do kind of wish if I was to change one thing about this I kind of wish I made it a little bit bigger just because there are I I did spend time on putting all these little details and stuff and especially when you post it on Instagram you can't see that you know Instagram you can't really zoom in on the image so I do kind of wish I made it a little bit bigger at least made one version of it that was bigger so you could see all those and appreciate all those details day four was mud and this was a really interesting prompt because I think when you're designing a dragon a lot of people want to go for like the cool ideas you know Sun and muscle even tiny are like there there's a lot of stuff you can do with it and they're just kind of more glamorous a little bit more sexy of concepts but mud is not something that people necessarily jump to I think when they're designing something it's not a word they want to associate unless you know specifically they need it like oh this is the swamp level we need to make a mud monster but I had fun with this one if you saw in the the beginning part there I tried a couple different things I wanted to make him look a little bit more fishy or maybe a little bit more frog like and I ended up kind of meeting in the middle he almost has kind of like a whale head I went for that kind of like torpedo kind of shaped for the head and then I gave him again like a kind of a big gorilla body with long arms and short legs and then I just kind of covered him in mud initially I was just gonna have the thing made out of mud but then I was like Anna it's not as cool I would like a creature that lives in the mud and he's kind of got like a swamp growing out of his back he doesn't really move that often there's like a frog on his head he's got like dragonflies buzzing around him and it was fun to do you know they're really a lot of colors that you can use for mud a lot of people think mud they just think brown but you can get a lot of greens and yellows and even reds in there too and I really like this color scheme that I did with this guy it's it's kind of like a Spiderwick Chronicles I don't know if anyone reads Spiderwick Chronicles or rent this pirate Chronicles when they were kids but the illustrations for those books this color scheme makes me think of that I ended up flipping the composition with this one it's something you should do it's a good exercise for all illustrators to flip your your canvas while you're working especially if you're working digital Oh exclusive people work you did it'll flip your canvas every once in a while it gives you a different perspective on what you're drawing and you never know you might like it and just keep it that way because I'm using procreate it doesn't save me flipping the canvas back and forth so you don't see me doing that but do that because you never know you might end up with something you like there so day 5 was Rock and this is again kind of going back to concepts that I think are very popular when designing things like dragons I wasn't super happy with this one this was very like first idea that came into my head I was pretty subliminally inspired by obsidian which is a pretty niche Godzilla monster from it only exists in one Godzilla video game that I had for the Wii when I was like 10 years old but yeah I kind of went for as opposed to the other ones that were a little bit more biological looking or you know xuo logically feasible whatever you want to call it this one is a little bit more fantastic it's like it's actually made out of rock and it's got some sort of magic holding it together I gave it sort of this like lava core that's holding all these rocks together and I gave it this very dynamic pose to that was the one thing I saw in my head I think it's because of this yu-gi-oh card called flame Belgard which actually doesn't it isn't necessarily made out of rocks but that's what I was imagining in my head because I heard rock and I was like rock by itself is a little boring and he does have some magma in there which is not super creative of me but again you know some of these things are kind of just the first idea just getting something down on paper is still a good exercise and good discipline for an artist to have so I went in with colors and again like mud you know a lot of people will think just gray or blue Gray's for rocks but you can get a lot of different colors in there when you're working with rocks and because I gave him all of you know he's made up of all these different shapes I tried to include like a wide range of colors with the rocks and I even when I overlaid the multiplied layers I gave them all different colors too so he has a lot of different colors going on and then I gave him his kind of lava molten core and I kept the line work on that a different color so it looks like it's glowing a little bit more you can see that the line work for the rock parts of him or is is a darker color and then the line work for the the lava part is similar to the color of the lava and that kind of if you like working with lines that's something you can do is use different colors for different parts if you want to make something look like it's glowing and you give it the same line work value as all the rest of the lines it's not gonna look it's not going to stand out but if you want to make something going to give it a line work you know use line work or colors that's different different values it makes them you know emphasize that glowing look so yeah there's rock not my favorite but day six was smooth now this was a very interesting I was stuck on this one for a while actually I didn't really know what I wanted to do but I thought about snakes was the first thing that came to my mind I think smooth and associated with dragons because if you ever feel a snake they are they're really weird like they're like really smooth and soft and like they feel like they've been polished so I went with like a very long serpentine body but then I gave it kind of as a being like bird-like like body and because that I was the other thing I was thinking of was um this is really gross like raw chicken was the other thing I thought of when I thought of smooth and you'll see when I put the colors in it that I kind of gave it a watch chicken color scheme but because that was in my mind I went for this kind of like slender bird-like wyvern with this very long snake-like neck and then almost like a rat kind of tail I gave it this kind of like segmented tail but I was really happy with the way this turned out this one I think was very simple and really inspired by the dragonology book that I had when I was a kid a lot of the Dragons had these very skinny scaly bird-like legs and that that was very evident here and this one and this is fun to watch me drop the colors down here because I go segment by segment and it kind of all the way up and I kind of get this gradient from painting to blue and then I overlay my textures but yeah so this was fun I I added in unlike my other ones I added in kind of like some highlights very subtle highlights you know not nothing too crazy but just to emphasize that sort of smoothness and that kind of weight scale kind of thing I want to make it feel like if you rubbed your hand on it it would almost like squeak you know like if you rub your hand on like a waxed car or something like it's got that nice Sheen to it and I made this one look very friendly she's got this kind of like curious friendly look you know she might still bite you but she's friendly so I was happy with the way this came out and I was stuck on this one for a while now day 7 the final day was stick and this one I was really stuck on for a while and I didn't really know how literal I wanted to take it so I ended up just like goofing off with the sketch and I was like okay what if I did this and I was like actually wait what if I did this and I ended up kind of liking this very stick like silhouette that I created so I was like actually let's just go with this and I stuck with it so I was you know very straightforward it's literally you know just a stick shaped like a dragon and you know you can it can be up to your interpretation if it's actually alive or it's just a stick that looks like a dragon but this was kind of fun because again it's not really something that you would make or at least that I would make ordinarily when I'm designing a dragon you know I like to make them either very animalistic or you know god-like I like to have like this real sense of power and light but this is kind of just like a whole different take from that it's like really stepping away from what you would think of when you thought least what I would think of what I think of dragons and kind of lowering it down to a base element and then just go and get goofy with it and I ended up really liking this it didn't take me long at all to draw as you can see the the time lapse is pretty short and my process was pretty short too but it was fun and again I like using this kind of green brown palette and all the angles and stuff are a lot of fun too and kind of making those little knots and twists and the branches I ended up really liking this one but yeah so there it is there's seven days of dragons I actually kind of did a live commentary over this so I'm sorry if it's very quick and hard to follow but there are my first seven days of dragons for smuggest I hope you guys enjoyed this if you did please let me know please let me know which one of them is your favorite and be sure to follow me on Instagram you can see my handle is in all of these it's magicJack art check that out and you can see the rest of my dragons for the rest of the month and I'll be sure to do this next week too if you guys enjoyed it so yeah thank you guys so much for watching please don't forget to check out our partner inked gaming link down in the description be sure to use the code subjectively ten at checkout for a 10% discount off of your entire purchase would help us out a lot and it helps out the artists who submit their work to this website so thank you guys again for watching and see you in the next video happy smuggest [Music]

Channel: Subjectively

Views: 126,303

Rating: 4.9781203 out of 5

Keywords: dragon, how to draw, speedpaint, speed draw, drawing, illustration, art, character design, #smaugust, procreate, photoshop, subjectively

Id: zZbyWhZ2O4E

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019