This artwork is by Tim Durning.
His words:
"With this piece I tried to redesign the dragon from the combination-animal point of view. Instead of something terrifying like a typical dragon I wanted a more nautical/aerial type of creature that would relate more to the idea of good, rather than a monster."
My class at the University of the Arts has just concluded and as I mentioned earlier, the final assignment was a dragon.
The students come to me with some foundation skills but few keep sketchbooks, and really don't know what their style is yet. They are students.
We start first semester working from the figure, drawing then learning the portrait, then monochromatic painting the introduce color. Second semester we learn portrait painting and ease out of that and into an illustration class. I try to sense what they need to do or try and move them into that direction. All the time, I stress the need to marinate their brains in art, movies, literature and the world to come to understand what they WANT to paint or draw. Suddenly, in most cases these students find a voice. If I see a spark I fan it and try to encourage a fire out of them.
With this final assignment, I gave them one word, "Dragon" and I could see their faces freeze. A few smiled thinking they won the lottery but soon found out everything has been done before, and doing something special is kind of hard.
I want to show some of these young artist a moment here on my Drawger blog.
