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.
Most of wyvernified Tem breed made in Draconia. As the previous post all those skins can be found on the discord of the game in the library.
- Arkady (savage)
- Lien (celestial)
- Percitia (mixed)
- Excidium (longwing)
- Volly (greyling)
- Dulcia (greycopper)
- Izkerkia (kazilik)
- Nitidus (pascal's blue)
- Fleur-de-nuit
- Défendeur brave
- Garde de Lyon (I see a lot of red ones, it is drab beige with blue spots!)
- Pêcheur couronné
- Copacati
- Churki ( inca dragon but breed unknown)
- Zhao-lung
- Yu-lang aka jade dragon
Finally redid my Kazilik design! Wow, what a color combo! On an older design of mine, I switched the order of the red and purple, and I really liked how that looked, so I kept that. Really like how this turned out!
I listened to the wonderful Temeraire series of audiobooks by @naominovik on Audible last year and had to illustrate my internal image of Best Dragon Iskierka for a friend.
