Curate, connect, and discover
This next project I am quite giddy about. The goal was to make many sketches with a black pen. Then I would photocopy my images and change their size or invert the colors to make a black and white collage.
I was thinking what would be really good as black and white. Then my mind wandered to Skyrim, as is usual, and how there are white and black dragons that kind of fall on different sides of the battle. Or so I’m told. Truthfully I started the game and played several hours of actual storyline until they release the Hearthfire DLC. Now I find ways to get money to make my house better. I also travelled town to town finding eligible bachelors wearing the Amulet of Mara. Then I realized that dudes never looked twice at me, but all these women kept throwing themselves at me. But who was the heroine who secretly had a crush on me, but would follow me all across the country bearing my burdens? So I married Lydia. Who wouldn’t want such a faithful parter? <3 After our beautiful wedding, she suddenly departed on foot. -_- I had to command line to catch up with her, and modded the game so I could give her a companion horse. Who says I don’t look out for my wife. <3Â
Aren’t we just the cutest couple? Aside from my character’s heavily scarred and tattooed face...
OH RIGHT....ARTWORK. THAT’S WHAT WE WERE HERE FOR.
I started by copying down the dragon alphabet. Here it is “A” through “Rawr” ;)
Here are some dragon shouts I copied down as well. There are quite a few, so I only chose some. The very bottom one (bottom right) is Fus Ro Dah!
Here is a reference photo from in game that I decided to use. This is Paarthurnax. He is a dragon that betrayed and helped defeat Alduin the first time. He teaches you shouts too.
Pencil map and measure
Now time to draw it for realsies in pen.
Paarthurax had other aspirations.
Here is a reference photo for Alduin. He’s a black dragon, but to make this easier on myself, I inverted the colors on the image. Now I can draw him as a white dragon in pen and inverse the colors later.
Like so.
Here’s a couple other tiny dragons.
Now to put it all together. After many hours of shrinking the dragon alphabet and then repeating it over and over again, we get a kind of cool “greyish” background. I used this for the sky. Then the larger print was to outline clouds.
Like this. then you invert the tiny dragons, so they are black and menacing after being risen from the dead by Alduin.
The dragon text that was shouts - I inverted the colors so that was all black with white text.
This I used as the ground and rock that Paarthurax could guard.
Here is the black colored version of Alduin. :)
And the full version of Paarthurax guarding the shouts.
And all together. I used Copic markers in various shades of grey to give it some atmospheric perspective.