WIP Grey Scale

As is often the case with my bigger pictures, I start with a very VERY rough draft just to make sure I have the layout and camera angle right first.

I think initially the horses at the front of the cart were being lead by dangling carrots but having one look behind in the end helped stop them looking like a copy paste of one another.

As you can see I dont place everyone in their correct positions to begin with for a picture like this. Just want to get their individual characters and details down. All that matters is that there's a matching, slightly top down look to them.

As for the main attraction, the title really set me up with a goal! As the saying goes "limitation encourages creativity" so apart from some very faint blush the dragon is all greyscale. With this in mind it felt right to make him look more old and wise.

As you can see I was originally considering a more traditional dragon nose but ended up with a more dog like one to make him just a little more unique. Also thought about adding specs but they didn't match suggested fictional time period.

I knew I had a bit of extra space on the dragons back but it had to be a shorter animal to fit in the scene so I went with a Meerkat.
He was just pointing the way to begin with but then I remembered that Meerkats often eat Scorpions so this would be the perfect opportunity to put one is as a brand new tickle tool along with the pitchforks I had planned. After all it could be some time before an opportunity like this to come up again and I love using new things ^^

With that it was a matter of padding out the crowd and the goal was to keep a variety of creatures in shot and give them all something unique to do weather it be aggressively throwing a tomato, having a frog smoking a bubble pipe or just being a less conventional form of eye candy.
When I did a Scottish terrier I just had to put him in a quilt.

These dogs always look old! Looks like he's the only one concerned enough to relate to the poor dragon being carted through the bustling street!

So with enough chopping bits and Photoshopping characters into place to ensure nothing was covering up any essential details, this messy sketch is the 2nd draft!

Things like huge wings or the tail had to be placed very carefully without looking unnatural on a piece like this as you could easily lose a lot of important visual information. And as much as Id like to show of as many paws as possible its inevitable to have some be completely obscured in a scene like this.

And after a lot of line work in SAI and layers in PS I'm ready to put on some music or some Youtube entertainment that's not too distracting and start the process of colouring.

For this particular piece the most time consuming part was actually all the chains. The links couldn't just repeat as they would twist on their path and also need to all look solid which means no bent links either, as well as convincingly hold such a powerful creature in place so there had to be a lot of them!

Thanks for reading ^^