Tonight's dragon was inspired by
Chagoi koi.
By the way you may not have noticed it, but in this litter each dragon was painted differently. I wanted to experiment with different techniques to paint each outcome and make them distinct from each other in some way. With these two, for example, I gave the first dragon a water ripple pattern while the second one has a lava-looking texture to its orange patterns:
And then there are these other two. While the first was colored more realistically with fish scales and everything, the second has a different approach to the scale patterns. I wanted the scales to look scattered like spotted skin to give the dragon a more natural look.
Overall I just took it as a challenge to figure out 6 different ways to approach a single theme... and that's mainly why this litter took forever to be finished too. I constantly got stuck trying to decide how to paint the next dragon. ¬¬'