Commission - "Doginra" Dragon OC
Added 2023-12-16 12:33:32 +0000 UTCA commission for Doginra on twitter of a character from his ongoing "Doginra Tales" project. I was asked to design a draconic variant on his existing character, a red-armoured figure with a segemented chainlike tail.
I was obsessed with drawing dragons as a child - first and foremost, almost every single thing i drew between the ages of 8 and 14 or so was a dragon of some description, or an effort to reinterpret an existing subject as one. I still have deep affection for dragons conceptually and get immensely excited whenever the promise of one appearing in something is raised, but for whatever reason I rarely paint them independently. When I do get the chance though, as in this case, there's more often than not a major influence present from the post Takahashi/Nomura school of semi-humanoid "Armored dragon" design, where the dragon takes on an almost anthropomorphic, godlike stature. I appreciate all approaches and all schools of dragon design, from the most absurdly ornamental and fantastical to efforts to portray them as speculative biologically sound organisms, but I do currently have a soft spot for the lineage of figures like FF's Bahamut or YGO's Triphyoverutum. Something about TCG depictions of dragons in Japan, especially those by figures like Mikio Masuda or Toshiaki Takayama feels like it carries a lineage from depictions of the more spectacular wrathful deities in the Buddhist tradition - an endless array of additional arms, fiery aureoles and scores of brandished symbolic weapons, in ever more vivid colour.
