Drawing a Dragon (Head & Neck)

I love to draw dragons because there is no limit to the amount of imagination you can use when createing them. They come in all shapes and sizes with everthing from spikes and fins to feathers, antlers, beaks, tuskes, and whiskers!

This is just a simple beginners guide to drawing the neck and head of a dragon, I hope to add further tutorials like this one on drawing the body, wings, and other features.

Step One

To start off any drawing I always sketch out the basic shapes and forms first. It helps to have some basic knowlege of animal anatomy. For dragons good refrences are always to look back to crocs, dinosaurs, snakes and other reptiles, but also look at the head and neck birds and horses as refrences for the necks and heads of dragons as well. looking at lions, deer, and dogs are good refrences for the heads of eastern style dragons.

Draw a curved line for the spine, and make the other features like the head and the nose out of rough circles or ovals and lines to get and basic idea of the position and placement of the head muscles and the expression desired.

Step Two

In drawing its good to start with the major features and then work toward the details. The next step after you sketch out your basic forms is to add som of the major features, things like mouth and eyes, and if your dragon has any major horns or fins. Eastern dragons tend to have antlers and ears like deer as well as ruffs and manes of fur around their heads, If your planning for a dragon with a mane draw some loose squiggles in just to get an idea of were it will be placed

Step Three

After you get an idea of were all the main features will be start to work in some of the finer featuers, add in little things like teeth and wrinkles. Put more details in around the nostril holes. You'll also want to start giveing your sketchy lines more definition, decideing right were you want them and drawing them in darker. If yoru dragon has spikes or horns protrudeing from its head add little details like the flesh of the head lumping slightly around were the horn joins the skull.

Step Four

Begin to add your scales, like before you may want to refrence real animals, lizards and even fish are good to look at. Start small and move around the contours of the features of the face with the scales getting larger as they get farther from these features. Use very small scales around eyes, ears, and nose holes. The top dragon in this tutorial has more of a beak and the bottom one a fleshy nose like a dog, so this isn't as apparant around the nostrils here, but you may draw your dragon however you like. Once you get the hang of  drawning dragons don't forget to use your imagination and make each of your dragons unique.

Step Five

Continue putting scales on your dragon, this part takes longest to do, don't loose patients and get sloppy. Take a break and come back to it later if you need to. If it helps you in your placement of the scales draw some contour lines to help show the curved shape of the face and neck. Eastern dragons usally have more diamond shaped scales or scales like fish, while western dragons can be seen with a large variety of scales shapes and size.

Step Six

Begin Shading your dragon, use the contours of the form like you did with the scales. Were more features come together the darker shadows will be. Don't worry about looseing some of those scales you worked so hard to put in, it will happen but its ok, in the end it will be worth it to give your dragon more dimesion and you may be suprised as even though you shade over some of the scales they will actually still show through.

Step Seven

Fill in your shading even more, give the hair on your eastern dragon some shadow and shading to help it really pop. Then use and eraser and clean up any stray smudges and smears around your dragon. My favorite brand of earaser is called "magic rub" it works really well. If you want however and you have a scanner you can clean up your smudges useing photoshop or other paint programs by playing with the brightness and contrast and useing white paintbrush tool. You can also do your shading and add color to your dragon once you get it scanned in.

This is my first tutorial that I have done so let me know what you think! I will do another tutorial on coloring/painting dragons in photoshop sometime in the future :D I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and have fun drawing dragons!