My vision of the character ‘Smaug’ from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’.
Pencil sketch, coloured digitally on IbisPaint X.
Here is a passage from The Hobbit describing Smaug’s appearance: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed.”
This is our husky named Shasta and was drawn in Photo Shop using the brush tool. I find the more I create using my computer the more inspired I am to return to the project at a later date. If I would have drawn this on sketch paper it would be lost in my piles of sketches and might never even get shared with anyone.
I wanted to redo a simple drawing from 2011. I found it lying around the piles of paper that I swarmed myself with a decade ago. I like to think I've learned a bit more technique in these past years.