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.








