Art Drawing Book Reviews: How To Draw And Paint Dragons

How to draw and paint dragons is a fairly detailed book on the art of creating dragons and painting them too, I bought this book a couple of months ago now and have been meaning to review it as it is a good book in it's own way with the subject of dragons being explored over 5 main chapters, the first chapter deals with Dragon Anatomy, which is fairly useful in that you learn how to draw all the elements such as the eyes and the dragon head structure as well as the all important wings, neck and tail with arms and legs.

The most fascinating part of the head and face study is that some of the dragons that the artist shows as an example are fantastically realised and slightly different to the way you'd imagine them as, and as usual throughout the book the artists take their inspiration from lizards and other real life creatures.

The next chapter examines the different dragon types that there are and how you can meld them together to make some quite fantastic dragons such as dragon serpents and wyrm like dragons which not many artists do, but I'm getting into drawing more stuff like that and will do on this blog.

Also other dragons may not have wings and some may be more traditional than others, so it is wise to have a look at various dragon types to see how you can approach with your own.

Equally important is the chapter on bringing your dragons to life, this chapter goes through the importance of drawing movement in your dragon drawings and how to visualize the compositions of a fantastic dragon artwork, the most inspiring part of this book is seeing where your own imagination takes you to create some superbly realised fantasy dragon art.

Light colour and texture is the 4th chapter which takes a look at all these 3 important areas and also examines using digital colouring to get the best results from using light and shadow and textures, also with a quick introduction into the basic artists tools that you could use in creating your art, towards the end of the chapter there is a section on painting a dragon in oil paints which gives an amazingly detailed look at the steps involved in creating a successful oil painting.

The last chapter is a gallery which gives you some more inspirational dragon paintings to look at and take what you can learn from them and it basically shows you that most great dragon fantasy paintings do tell a story and have dramatic scenes within them.

Lastly you get some dragon templates that you can trace and scan into your computer to play around with and I found these useful to draw from and come up with some original dragon drawings for my own tattoo work and dragon fantasy art.

This is a good book, although there are loads of similar books available out there, this is one you should take a look at, just click on the photo above to find out more! or see how to draw dragons here

Also see recommended artists drawing books