Dragon thumbnails

I’ve been doodling some dragon designs the last few days in my spare time. Dragon is a strong word if you look the thumbnails below, they are more of a jungle – monkey – birdish types of dragon, and yes, as you expected , the majority of them don’t brief fire, sorry if I disappointed you.

I don’t know why but the jungle theme couldn’t go out of my head so many of them are dragons that don’t fly but just glide from tree to tree, hang from trees like monkeys and so on. For the gliding idea I was particularly inspired from an episode of BBC’s “Planet Dinosaur” (great documentary :D).

From the bunch below I really like the balloon dragon idea (thumbnail number 5). I imagine it when the air sack on his back is full and he lift off the ground, by strongly swinging his tail up and down he can gain height. The other favourites of mine are number 3 , 7 (the flying squirrel dragon :D) , 8 , 9 , 14 and 15 (monkey dragon :D).

(click the images below to see them in high-res)







I had some real fun doing these, but I enjoyed the sketched ones more than the pure black silhouettes. The abstract method of thumbnail generation also didn’t feel very comfortable for me.





Here is a further exploration in 3d based on the thumbnail number 8, done for a bit more than an hour.