a dragon confides in a fairy

A DRAGON CONFIDES IN A FAIRY

digital art

© Lise Winne 2016

new! Prints available in any size, from 6" x 8" up to 30" x 40". Available on 

canvas, acrylic, giclee, etc. Through the same link, products are also for sale with this item (cell phone cover, apparel, etc). Go HERE for both prints and products).

For a home printed giclee print which is hand signed, I will be putting that up for sale soon (check back on this page)

For the rest of this post, I describe a little of how I made this piece by showing "work in progress" details.

This is how it all started, by spotting these two figures having a tete a tete at a Renaissance faire:

A DRAGON CONFIDES IN A FAIRY

(raw photo)

Naturally I hated the background, so I took the figures out of their environment.

Why did I do that?

Does a sidewalk that mere mortals walk on belong here? No, of course not. Do fairies enjoy gravel? No way. Though I did save a touch of gravel here and there in the final piece. 

Fairies are small creatures, and they do best in an environment where plants are bigger in size than they are. Dragons tend to be huge, but since this one has sneakers, he could be a dragon at the toddler stage.

This is the basic environment I gave them (I decided to save the basket and chair too from the original photo):

A DRAGON CONFIDES IN A FAIRY

(preliminary I)

Better. They seem to fit in naturally in an environment of weeds, brambles and small flowers.

You may not be able to tell, but I also gave the fairy more of a complexion; she was looking awfully pale.

There was still something missing. 

The dragon's suit, though cute, resembles a workman's coverall a little too much. So, I gave him more reptilian skin. The scales on his tale also needed some texture, so I took care of that. Then his wings were a little too drab, so I brightened them up and put a few sparks in them.

The fairy still wasn't magical enough (for me). So I made her wings glow and put some luminaries around her. 

If you look closely at the next enhanced photo, you'll notice that the fairy's basket has some sparkles too.  

The background and foreground needed a lot more flowers. So I grabbed flowers from a photo shoot I did in Maine awhile back at this magical little garden with exotic flowers. Not that you can tell they are exotic. What mattered was that I could incorporate them.

Also, when a dragon talks, he has to have fire coming out of his mouth. A dragon would not be a dragon without that element, so the fire was a necessity. So I took a photo of a flame on a light background and put it on its side. The fire part of this piece was the most difficult to master. Fire is not a solid object. There are places where you can see through it and places where you can't. It also does not shoot straight out, which is what it looked like when I first started. So making it curve toward the sky was another challenge.

Also, around the dragons face, it needed to be brighter, since fire would light it up. 

The dragon also seemed to need smoke around it. After all, its innards are full of fire (right?), so it has to be smokin' from head to toe in some manner!

This was what I thought would be the final piece:

A DRAGON CONFIDES IN A FAIRY

(preliminary II)

And I was happy with it for awhile. 

Then I wasn't happy. For days I couldn't tell what it needed. It just seemed to be missing something! 

Then it dawned on me: the chair had nothing on it. A fairy wouldn't just use it to sit on, would she? She would place something on it while she went to talk to the dragon. Fairies are very busy, so they have to multi-task.

What would be the perfect thing for the chair? A flower, of course:

    A DRAGON CONFIDES IN A FAIRY

(preliminary II)

That is a real flower, just in case you wanted to know. But here it looked like a pom-pom.

No, no, no, that wouldn't do. 

It took an entire evening to put that flower in there too, but it just wasn't the right kind of flower.

So, out it went. 

So I searched my files and came up with this one instead:

 A FAIRY's CHAIR WITH A FLOWER

Better. And I did put some shadowing under the flower and its stem to make it sit and belong in its environment. But if you check the final piece (first picture above), I made the flower a little more purple so that it wouldn't detract from the fairy and her companion. Here it seems to be shouting out; it is just so neon -- and the dragon does not need to be distracted by the fairy's bright flower. 

Next time, I'll be attempting to do something with this photograph: 

FAIRY, WIZARD, KNIGHT and FAIR MAIDEN QUE
(preliminary I)

Until next time ...