I Like Pickled Papaya

RaptorofErebus’ art blog. I draw what I want. Right now that want is dragons.

[atcharachara]

Small Ukiyo-e Study

Not very rigorous to dragon design. Focus was on recreating the "vibes" of the referenced work and adding a dragon in it. It was also fun making that style of signature. Ukiyo-e is woodcut print, so I limited myself by making each color a single layer.

Lady Arikawa's reference is "Bijin - Enshoku Sanpuku Tsui".

Lord Jinai's reference is "The Former Emperor from Sanuki Sends Allies to Rescue Tametomo".

Brush used is the default Tinderbox.

I hate drawing scales! It's too much work! I need to be in a certain headspace to subject myself to it. I cheated worked the system by drawing a section and then simply copy pasting it over the body, but that was after Arikawa's

For Lady Arikawa's piece:

Tenne (天衣) or Hagoromo (羽衣) is the term used for the floating "scarves" usually seen around Tennin, or divine messengers of Japanese Buddhism. You can actually see this among East Asian mythology in general, having been derived from Buddhist (and by association Hindi) Apsaras. I think her silk scarves were quite clever!

For Lord Jinai's piece:

There supposed to be a dragon transport there taking the place of the retainers in the original work along with Temeraire and Company instead of the Tengus. But I couldn't imagine what a dragon transport actually looked like on top of making sense of dragon sizes...

Lord Jinai is twice as big as Maximus just in the parts seen. Is that a from belly to back two Maximus on top of each other? Two Maximus from belly to head?? It's certainly not length since the whole dragon is not seen (or maybe it is and I'm confused?), nor can it be standing height since he was in the water (or maybe it was???)

Very quick mouse doodle

I don't actually know how big Maximus is either... I'm bad with sizes.

In general:

To further differentiate from other Asian breeds, for my design the Japanese breeds lean a lot on fish. Universally they all have fins of sorts. The Sui Rius are pretty obvious on that front. Lady Arikawa is a cat(fish.) I apologize for the flash bang but here's some old related doodles.

Lady Kiyomizu's study is stuck in limbo. Because I suck at the bridge (a big focal point of the piece!) and dread the wedding. I'll accept doing heavy referencing but didn't want to copy outright for my study so I can't cheat in that way, even for the people.

Besides that, I think it's really interesting that it's Ingersoll's work that was referenced for the Japanese dragons considering that it's largely discredited in authenticity. There are no references to these dragon kings that are not sourced from Ingersoll’s book or from before it was published. Attempts to find other references leads back to him (if the source is not credited just compare the wording whenever these dragons are mentioned- it's exactly the same as his text!)

The dragon kings do exist, though mostly in the form of the Buddhist or Shinto ones. They do not share the same names.

"Sui Riu" and "Ka Riu" at least has the decency to return dragons, though this is because elemental-aligned dragons pop up often in various media. Plesioth and Rathalos from Monster Hunter, for example, have the titles 水竜 [suiryuu] and 火竜 [karyuu] respectively.

(Speculation) In the context of the HMD, it might be possible that the dragon breed names are, in fact, really just "Water dragon" and "Fire dragon." For all we know (which is almost nothing), these names are categorical by ability rather than referring to a specific breed (again this is speculation).

This breed [Unknown] spits water. It is a kind of water dragon (Sui Riu). This breed [Unknown]'s venomous bite burns. It is a kind of fire dragon (Ka Riu).

Instead of Ingersoll, Godai (Buddhist Five Elements) or Gogyo (Wuxing) might have been referenced instead. They're not dragons specifically, but both have Fire (Ka) and Water (Sui) . The use of "Riu" makes this less likely. That said from what I can glean, Japanese dragon romanized as "Riu" has been used by another publication of the time (Histoire des Dynasties Divines, 1884). For a contemporary closer to Ingersoll's publication (and in English), de Visser 1913 uses "Ryu". Griffis' 1880 uses "Riu", but as part of a name; mentions of dragons are translated as is instead of romanized (so they're dragons rather than "Riu" or "Ryu")

There's also the mention of Kirin that I don't know if it's a dragon, survey ship, or just the name of a scouting force.

But I think I'll think about it more when I feel like doing the Japanese dragons. I do like a reason to do unnamed or undescribed breeds.

[atcharachara]

Some of the described European Ferals:

The Lithuanian Feral. Described with narrow heads and large boney crests upon them in stripes of orange and yellow. They were green and brown, though one individual was described to be similar to Lien and another being simply green with a crest in orange and brown. They like fancy plates.

The Scottish Feral, Ricarlee. Ricarlee has been described as mottled dark green with a purplish brown belly, but also being grey(?). The latter could be excused as part of his body paint, which he is shown here (minus the grey paint).

The first harnessed dragon of the Western (European) World, Vici taking a moment to yawn. She was described as looking similar to her mother but with blue spines, so a muddy green with paler green stripes and spots.

A lot of yapping under the cut.

I'm not actually familiar with any dragon folklore from either countries, so I read up a little on them.

The Lithuanian feral! Oh how I adore crests. I had to control myself to not give it the classic dilophosaurus double crest and settle with just one. For my design I gave it neck spines and long tail filaments bring to mind a rooster. Perhaps it may be called an Aitvaras locally with that resemblance.

The Scottish feral was in a dearth of descriptors, so I filled it in with... Dearc! I'm obsessed with the (not so) little guy since it's publication! Alas, I stayed a bit conservative with the design. I knew exactly where a "purplish brown" is on the color wheel, but color being relative it just looks plain purple next to the green. I think I used the wrong reference for the warpaint, since it seems like they go way brighter (but I don't know much about Scottish things, so maybe it's just those awesomebro reconstructions that I'm seeing?)

Vici is more of fun thing to round out the trio, based on my old design for her back when I did Smaugust some years ago. Back when I still had some semblance of focus to do monthly prompts...

Longer than the Dragon of Brusidium, Vici's mother is around 4-6 in elephant weight. Assuming a Carthaginian elephant, which I cannot find the average weight of so I'm using its closest in (alleged) size the African Forest Elephant (4.25 t), mom would be in the range of 17-26 tons. Vici is probably around that too.

As an extra: The "Lien-like" individual and Ricarlee without his body paint.

The pale one wasn't described in any other way other than being similar in looks to Lien, but on that thought might either be leucistic or albino which brings me to a tangent.

Lien is weird to me in regards to being albino. An albino's "red" eyes is due to the lack of pigment in the iris highlighting the blood vessels (even then is dependent on angle, though some types of albinism still have pigments in the eyes which would be unlikely to be red for a Celestial's case.)

Dragons, however, has been established to have dark red-black blood, most frequently being simply black. Lord Jinai's eye has even been explicitly described as being shot through with broken black vessels. The blue wing spots could be shrugged as turning red due to being a structural color (optics and color is not something I like studying </3), but I don't know, I'm still hung up on the eyes. In the defense of the eyes, that really old celestial had translucent black scales tinted red by his flesh and blood. (Though if there is enough flesh in your iris to tint it a color instead of uhh eye jelly that's a cause for concern)

Black and blue vs White and red is such an iconic color opposites for rivals, so I'll give it that. Rule of cool.

Relevant very old doodle of the different Celestials in the Chinese court, more of an exploration in color variation, learning how the brush worked, and finding out how I wanted the dragons to look. No attempts has been made to description accuracy otherwise (except for the colors of the old guy and Lien.)

[atcharachara]

Happy year of the Fire Horse! Unrelated to that, here are the three named Turkish dragons

From left to right:

Alaman, lightweight.

Akhal-teke, middleweight. Not the horse. Neigh

Kazilik, heavyweight. A highly sought after dragon as they are the largest known firebreather.

There is another Turkish dragon: the guard dragons mentioned in the book. They have no identifying features other than being lightweight (an Alaman? Something else?) and being kinda fat due to their cushy job. It does make me think about the fat distribution of dragons...

Design rambling under the cut.

Other than the Kazilik, neither named breeds are described except for their eggs. Eggs at least seem to resemble the adult dragons... thus far, which is something to play with.

I messed up the formatting, so my rambling is in reverse order.

Ahh, the Kazilik. Unlike the Chinese who were quite particular with form and proportions in their dragons, this dangerous piece of work is allowed to push the asiatic body type to an extreme as the focus is on their firepower. (They could knot themselves together!) Not pictured is the trailing steam from each of those "thorns" from whatever infernal internals make their fire. Their horns are distinctive, thrusting upwards from their forehead.

For errors, the tongue and thus the inside of the mouth should have been black. I missed that. There's also a talon-less claw like a ceratopsian that shouldn't be.

Does a connected tail fan count towards the number of wing spines? Probably not, right? I want to make it loonger and adding a tail fan(?) helps reconcile the length and wing attachment in my mind.

Drawing so much spots is so tiring.

The Kazilik also has a larger range of descriptions compared to other dragons in the book, which isn't saying much. The topmost has colors inspired by the individual described by Laurence when recalling the Nile in the third book, an orange-and-black beast. The green is murky, perhaps difficult to see from the distance and easily mistaken as black. The middle is your "typical". Or, well, Iskierka. The bottom is the individual nearly mistaken for Iskierka in LoD, whose hide was notably more black-green.

I think I leaned too much into the horse for the Akhal-teke, but I sure do love how it turned out! The egg was described to be cream colored with red and orange spotting. I referenced the conformation of the Akhal-teke (horse), with a long, level back and sloped shoulders. Chest is narrow from the front. The legs are more generic though still based on horses.

The Alaman takes a lot more for their design to the classical Middle Eastern depictions of dragons. In the book, the egg was described as being pale lemon yellow and nothing else other than size. I am for some reason allergic to a dragon so plain nowadays, so yeah. I'll consider Alaman referring to a village in Iran vs the Germanic tribe, so its ears are extended out and it has a pointed keratinized nose in a way to resemble the Iranian dragon Azdaha in its various depictions in manuscripts.

(Refern I miss you) Middle eastern dragons love their spots! All three have spotting of sorts and a sort of elbow... crest?. I like referencing folklore and stuff. Most of the manuscripts seen here are from various copies of Shahnameh, or Epic of Kings. I've lost the sources for the rest, though Turkey does have a historic collection of carvings of dragons, and for some reason they are hard to find (maybe because I'm searching in English?)

Here's the old one. As you can clearly see, the Alaman is lifted directly from it (I quite like the design!). No matter what I did for the Akhal-teke, I didn't like it. My usually course for that is to sit and think about it some other time but it never quite went away and working on the colors or other dragons felt like a drag as a result, so I just drew up a new one.

[atcharachara]

Just a sketch again to try out some new (inbuilt) brushes. Pencil brushes have lovely textures. I was dreading coloring a Kazilik because I didn’t think the colors would look good together, but it seems like my fears were unfounded! The spines however…

I went by with what I remembered, so it might not be accurate. Did it have nose horns? I don’t know, actually. I didn’t even check my notes or the book. The next dragon page will be Turkish dragons because of this. Of which, like, only two is described. The Kazilik (lots of material for these guys) and those cow guard dragons near the capital (one scene and as usual, just barely). We do have egg descriptions for the Akhal-Teke and Alaman, and eggs at least seem to correspond to dragon colorations… usually. So… Fun.

[atcharachara]

Just a colored sketch page for now, no rendering. Russian dragons. Not up to scale (don’t trust that visual on the right)

Of these, only the Russian Gray and Ironwing are named in the book (The Gray only in LoD). Both the Ironwing and Cossack dragon didn’t come with descriptions of any sort so I just winged it. Thoughts under the cut.

Russian Heavyweight - Big, green, and mean. Well, Vosyem was green, so this guy is green. Overlapping plates made me lean more on pangolin scales than thyreophoran but doing all the scales is killing me. I gave it a large nasal boss(I think thats the term?) to resemble the tapir-faced depictions of Zmei that had enraptured me since I was young.

The tortoise resemblance was not realized until after I colored everything, but theres only so many ways for long neck and humped back and thick rolls over shoulders read to me. Well, there’s the sauropod type but I prefer a more sprawling pose. I do want it a bit longer but I just like long dragons in general. Need to hold back on it. If everything is long then nothing is Long.

Russian Gray - Mostly gray and white with a narrow arrow-shaped head. They were described as stippled with spots of gray and black. I had on my notes that it was six to seven, but I lacked context on whether it was the number of individuals in the scene or its weight.

Heads being described as arrow shaped confuse me a little. Maybe my English is not good because I keep thinking it’s like… diplocaulus, which is NOT narrow. Yu-Lung, described with the same head shape, was also described to be vulpine, so that’s what I did here.

Russian Black - One of the other lightweights held in the Russian grounds along with the Russian Gray. Described as black dragons smaller than the Grays. Resembles the Russian couriers. Nothing much to say. Slavic dragons seem to be depicted with a crown every so often, so I gave it a crown of small horns.

Every time there’s a black dragon breed from Europe I keep remembering Laurence saying something about how there’s no black dragons known in Europe back when he was still a Naval captain.

Courier - Two red courier dragons were snoozing next to a flag. I’m inclined to think it’s a Russian breed, but it described the flag they were sleeping beside as white and red. Granted, I’m not really familiar with European history or flags. Maybe it’s a company flag?

Cossack - No description other than being courier weight or fly weight, the size of winchesters. Did you know that the Russian Don, cavalry horses of the Cossack, originated from Russian Steppe horses and Oriental breeds obtained from raids? I gave it a more camelid head, but didn’t want the horse inspiration to be too obvious. Not happy with the coloration just yet.

I kinda wanted it to be slightly bigger for some size variety, but it’s unlikely to be that much bigger than the other Russian lightweights. In the British (European?) weight system a flyweight is barely combat weight, isn’t it? So larger than courier weight but not that much…

Ironwing - Venomous. Thats it for textual description. Not much to go off of, so I put a lesser version of the heavyweight armor on it to help bridge the heavyweight to the others and slapped rusty iron colors. I wanted to give it some more resemblance(Is that the word?)for being an ancestor of the Longwing, so I gave it some familiar wing markings. Might add bone spurs but maybe I should keep that a sharpspitter thing.

[atcharachara]

The Chinese form of military logistics favored Middleweights, but a few of their local breeds easily reach Heavyweight category.

The Zhao-Lung, or Emerald Glass, are green with red markings and a bristling spine of tendrils that can grow out into a mane. They come from the North and have a small rivalry with the Southern Shao-Lungs in the military.

The Shao-Lung, or Scarlet Flower, are orange or red with multiple horns and yellow crests, which can grow out into mane. It has two rows of small teeth and two pairs of curving fangs.

The Tien-Lung, or Celestial, is smooth glossy black with opalescent blue dapples on the bottom edge of its wing. It is distinguished from its more common relative the Qin-Lung, or Imperial, by having webbing between the flexible horns on its head like a frill and thin tendrils around its mouth. The former enjoys a status similar to aristocracy, while the latter is held to high expectations as part of the literati.

The Emerald Glass' head shape I based on the extant Chinese Alligator, while the Scarlet Flower borrowed from the extinct Chinese Gharial (Hanyusuchus), which also (roughly) matches where both breeds originated from. Hanyusuchus is found in South China, while the Alligator is technically in the vague north from there, in East China.

The choice of coloring the back and snout tendrils of Emerald Glass white lies in giving them some to the dragon present in the Qing flag (its horns are also modeled from that). The Scarlet Flower gets to have the nose (like Gharials, a gender feature) and the little crest it has on the cheek. Cutting up the Qin dragon into little parts...

I tossed around how to do a Celestial's ruff because reading "webbing between flexible horns"- FLEXIBLE HORNS?- threw me off. Qian supposedly had ribbed horns. Is that technically jewelry? Is it not? Might revise. Maybe not.

The Celestial's frill is unlike the other Chinese breeds, resembling the fish-like frills of certain Japanese dragons...

[atcharachara]

Sketch where I made the wrong decision to color so I have to commit with my mistakes. Featuring the... (checking an adjective dictionary) effervescent Shao-lung

Trying out a dragon page layout featuring the common but reliable Yellow Reaper. Most likely will stick to something simpler

A sketch page that stayed a sketch page thank god. Trying out how I wanted to draw HMD's dragon wings. Featuring the... uhh... gassy Zhao-lung

Rambling under the cut

It was while making the first when I decided to go back and actually decide how I'll do the wings. In the books, the fingers of the wing had never been described as fingers as far as I remembered. Spines that separate it in sections, mentions of wing joints (Unsure if this refers to spines or joints proper; Temeraire has more than others, French dragons having a distinctive shape of their second joint), Fidelitas being described to be the Yellow Reaper with extra "ribs" in his wings. I guess it can all be flowery figure of speech, but it reminded me a lot of how in medieval European dragon art a winged dragon has a fancy splayed out fin for a wing if it's not feathered.

So anyway, that's my reason for choosing to go a bit outside of keeping it like a bat's. The supporting spines being separate from the bones proper. I'm a fan of the pterosaur shape with at most three fingers: one or two as a digits that count separately, and the other as the leading edge and counts among the "spine".

I'll do a mix of the folded styles depending on breed. Most European breeds I'd probably draw with bird wing style folding because it's cool. Celestials (and perhaps Asian breeds in general), fold their wings tightly, all to heavily lean into the fan iconography when they flare it out.

The sketch wing is boringly practical that vaguely resembled a Chinese Junk's sail. My favorite was the butterfly-moth wing shape. That one just kicks ass.

[atcharachara]

Smaugust 2024

I only made 4 things that I can say passed the literally just a sketch phase, but that's better than the previous years slump at least!

I used two prompt lists, A being the from SmaugustCircle in Twitter, and B from PencilCat's.

Details on each under the cut

1B - From Book - A certain hatchling Akhadian Desert Drake from "In the Labyrinth of Drakes" by Marie Brennan. It's days were numbered from the start, but the care it received afforded it more time to live.

10A - Vintage - "Saint George delivering Saint Margaret" has one of my favorite depiction of European dragons. It's so cute.

24A - Venomous - It's been a while since I read the Temeraire books. A "Bengal" pair appeared in a small scene in Book 9. Is Bengal just a demonym? A breed? Whichever the case, they hate the British all the same. Of particular note is their "many-taloned' claws, green venom, and frilled serpentine head which stuck out to me. I reread my old notes on it after and lmao I missed some details

30B - Your Choice - Lady Kiyomizu, how endearing! Originally this was for the "Tempest" prompt on A, but my mind skipped a few (Tempest -> Storm... or like Shakespeare's play -> Oh hey didn't Laurence act out some of his plays for Kiyomizu -> This has nothing obvious to do with Tempest)

[pocketss]

that’s a hard yes

[atcharachara]

Dinovember 8: Deinocheirus (Fire/Steel/Poison)

KAINGIMON (Champion)

A Dinosaur Digimon created from the slightly corrupted data of a “Deinocheirus”. It decimates swathes of forests for its own groves and pollutes the area with smoke and ash, putting it at odds with other Digimon. Extremely territorial, it strikes down any challengers with powerful swipes. Despite this, it remains vital to the ecology of the ancient rainforest zone; the ashes revitalizes the soil.

[atcharachara]

Patting myself on the back for doing at grand total of one (1; isa) finished work for Honkaitober! Yahoo!

(One not quite there yet piece under the cut)

Alright now for the few I’m not that embarrassed to share:

Day 7: Fire (Commentary: Just missing a simple background and some details. This was actually done within the day I was just bemoaning the lack of gradient tool in procreate [a staple of mine in medibang for doing this style])

Day 6: Lightning (Commentary: A victim of “oh I’ll rip out the model for proper reference first” I played Lobcorp instead)

I’ll probably come back to them eventually

[atcharachara]

Honkaitober Prompt #2 - Memorial Arena

I’ve never actually gotten to fight SSS Benares, on the account of my subpar skills and allergy to rolling on the weapon and stigmata banners. Its so hard to find references of her. What, do I have to rip her model myself? (Please don’t sue me Mihoyo)

For my sanity I’m going to take it slow and consider the days as suggestions.

[quark-nova-deactivated20260116]

chordate pride flag because why tf not

yes it's just a notochord going across the flag

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

anyways I bring up Barney bc I think having a purple accurate (and feathered, though that's still a hypothesis) Tyrannosaurus as a symbol of universal love and human connection would actually be a pretty punk way of reclaiming the character, if someone wanted to do that

[dragonfeathrs]

I gotchu, fam

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Perfection

[atcharachara]

Also consider

Disclaimer: dubiously accurate because I just woke up went woah and then sketched and colored without thinking much