(click for DA link and more images of my dragon)


Excerpt from Encyclopaedia Dracologica, chapter 6. "Witness report of the birth of a greater Grey dragon" by dracologie professor E.H. Schlelwinger:

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"Few humans ever witnessed the birth of a dragon, even less so one of those relics of dragons known as greater Grey ones. The key to my success was the very strong telescope of my own design I managed to put into my hideout several leagues from the beast's lair. Nevertheless I'm certain the beast knew of my presence, that it let me be can be of no other reason that it deemed me no threat.

The Grey's egg was long as a grown man and elongated more so than your normal bird's egg. It was not camouflaged, nor particularly hidden. Sometimes the parent even left for long times, leaving the egg unguarded. After a few days of vigilance from my hideout, the reason for this carelessness became clear: not a single larger predator was alive nearby the lair. The forest was dead quiet far and wide.

On my tenth day of vigil, the egg finally hatched. It is hard to describe my feelings at this tremendeous occation. My eye pressed against the lens, I made sure to take careful notes of everything. The Grey hatchling took some time to break out of the heavy shell, and got no help in this regard from its parent.

The creature emerging lacked much of the soft features one expects in species' children, the child had claws and already the wicked "grin" of teeth were clearly prevalent. It seemed partly or fully blind at birth however, its eyes covered in white membranes rather than the pitch black glare of a grown creature.

Contrary to more modern races of dragon, a greater Grey has no scales; it's not a reptilian but a separate sub-branch of the vertebrae. Studies have instead shown that its heavy armour is due to a gradual hardening and thickening of its skin, a sort of all-encompassing athlete's foot that continues throughout the dragon's life. This I could now confirm through my telescope: The new-born Grey already showed some patches of grey, but also large uneven patches of pink, unprotected skin, not yet hardened to its final structure. Its head seemed particularly unfinished; it crawled out of its sticky mess of birth fluids with much of the jaws not yet having acquired its armour.

The new-born dragon flopped around helplessly for a few moments before pulling out its wing membranes and body from its egg, steadying itself and taking in its surroundings. Its eyes were blind, but I could have sworn it looked at me across the vast distance, with a wicked, shrewd intelligence unbefitting something so young ..."

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Done in MyPaint + GIMP from scratch, a few hours. Excerpt in the caption is from my own fictional (duh) Encyclopaedia Dracologica, ca 2003. The greater Grey dragon's design is ©Griatch and all that by the way.

Comments and feedback welcome as usual.
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Griatch

With imagination and skill like you have, I definitely envy your creativity and ability Griatch. Just one favor to ask of you; if you do happen to see it's momma, I hope you can run fast enough.

fantastic, and I loved the narration!

Greeeeeat job!

I am with 2-T, The narration finishes the presentation!

Stunning Griatch!

Well well done as always! Don't see anything that needs fixing. You should give it a background now.

I love dragons. That's a great newly hatched dragonet.

I enjoyed the narration along with the artwork.

Beautiful work, as always, Griatch.

Excellent work Griatch!
Love your style as always.

Same here! really bad, I have a total of 73 dragon posters 23 dragon necklaces, 5 watches, and more.

Also my other nickname besides Speed, is "The Fighting Dragon" lol no joke.

btw, I'm jacking this lol

This is beautiful.

F*cking brilliant.

Thanks for the comments everyone!

@mikethedj:
I won't be adding a background to this one; it's busy enough as it is and the full background I did originally (yes I did do one, fully lit and textured too) I felt just muddied up the focus of the image so I scrapped it.
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Griatch

Hey Griatch; not going to show since this is your creation, but you can really get a cool Giger glow effect by using G'MIC's Tone map preset as I outlined here. Big fan of Giger's work (am I crazy; maybe; lol).

Thanks lylejk, yes Giger is great! I rarely use any filters of this type, so if you have a good example use of it for this image to show, I'd be glad to see it.
Normally, if I wanted to mimic Giger's style I would rather prefer to (try to) do it manually with the airbrush tool (he is a master airbrusher after all, that is where the "glow" effect really comes from). But I'm old-fashioned in this sense, and it's quite likely that a filter would create a more similar effect than I could do manually.

The dragon head (not the surroundings) below I did with the airbrush and is reasonably giger-esque in style I think (it's a very old image).
http://griatch-art.deviantart.com/art/E ... r-38280681
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Griatch

Thanks Griatch; again, the effect is subtle, but I do like the glow like feel after tonemapping.

Anything posted is fair game afaic. Glad you like it.

@lylejk
It's indeed really subtle, to the limit of not being sure what is done or not. I guess it shows even more on a larger resolution. Not bad at all, thanks for showing me.
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Griatch

Hope you don't mind I jacked this for a wallpaper lol

So, is the mama anywhere around? Will she be making an appearance since so many of us are snooping around her newly hatched hatchling?