Space Dragon

Art by Julie Akeman

My finished Space Dragon..might make some adjustments later..don't know..after I've done a load of work I let it set for a while to dry..the beauty of oil paints is that you can work quickly and you can leave it alone and change it up later..I did love splattering the paint..have to wait for it to dry to see how doing it that way will work once it dries.

Painting Space For a Dragon

Video

Hello friendly followers..Akemanartist is at it again..I am working on more creative dragon paintings on small canvases..if you would like to buy one just keep following me, oils take a bit to dry through I am using water soluble oils which doesn't take as long but still need a month to be sure.  I will be revamping my Etsy shop and will get things in place..keep following.

In this video I just did a spacelike background and yes it will have a dragon but it's going to be an outline of one and I will try to get a video of that process too.

I only used three colors of Lukas Berlin watercolor paints

Titanium white

Ultramarine (one of my favorites)

and Cobalt Violet

I prefer to paint fast and work alla prima for the most part..sometimes I wait for the backgrounds to dry before I add my dragon..it depends on how I want to do it..working wet in wet I have to make sure I want to alter what I have going on..in another background I decided to let it dry before I add the dragon..I try both ways of doing this and really I like both ways..it all depends on how I want to mix the paint on canvas.

Due to some issues you have to click the video link, it goes to my Facebook page.

And this is another background for another dragon to be painting..stay tuned.

Moon Dragon

The background for my next dragon painting..calling it my moon dragon..probably going to end up as a series just so I can work on the job of backgrounds then letting the paint dry a little then adding the dragon..working wet into wet...maybe I'll be the Bob Ross of Dragons haha.

I'm listening to Pink Floyd's What do you Want From Me (I don't own the rights to the music)..audio not that great..had to balance the laptop to do the video.  Someday I'll get a camera and stand.  I painted the background the day before with water soluble oils, then start with a sinuous line to mark out the shape of the dragon.  Probably best to watch with the audio off..it's pretty hard on the ears.

The stars are fun to add...I have to step back to see how they look..trying to make them sparkle.
You can see the basic shape of the dragon and it's very similar to the Luck Dragon I did last year..basically in the same position..this one the snout is a lot shorter.


I do love the Chinese style of dragons with the fur waving in the wind..and yes I love Spirited Away..love to see it again.  I want to work at doing this over and over again to get the feel of doing the dragons in this kind of way..I love mixing the paint into the canvas..my art teacher..the only one I didn't like and also found out none of the other teachers liked her..was always against mixing onto the canvas...be free to experiment for yourself you know...that's how you find your style..try different brands of paint.  I use Lukas oils, they dry quickly, and now I switched to their water soluble oils because they are so easy to clean and you really only need water to mix..and I found out that I can also use acrylic with it on the surface..did a small experiment to see if they do work since they are water based and yes they do.
If you have any interest in buying my paintings please comment..let me know what you like..My old Etsy shop has been inactive but once I get my artworks lined up I will try to put things together..I am a single mom so this is tough.  My ex hit one of the younger kids, they got taken into custody, and it took a couple of days to get them released to me..three kids..and I work part time at a library so it's been my wish to support myself better through my art..which takes time and support.
Thank you for reading this..let me know what you like..and I hope to make prints because really these oil paintings will be priced high..I put a lot of work in it.

My art on video

I am testing out to see how this handles..I did a video to a friend of mine about my art.  I am considering doing Patreon and they upload a lot of videos..well..I don't have the best of video equipment now just my laptop.  This is a test run to see how this works then I can seriously consider doing videos through my laptop till I can afford a better camera set up..we all have to start somewhere.

I first started this last year during October, inspired by one of my friend's poems, yes Corey from Ghosts of Home we were talking about werewolves and I showed him my original drawing, said I really should do it as a painting and I started it but didn't finish it, now back to work on it.

That was the original sketch done years back so as you can see it was really rough but still had the idea of what I wanted only while Red was looking scared (as well as looking like an alien, she looks like E.T.!!)  In the final painting she holds a dagger and she's got this I'm not bothered look about her...she seems down right Fey..quite a difference.

Goblin King Painting

This is one of my favorite painting I have done.  I did this two weeks after I heard about his death.  I was so upset when I went online that day to hear of David Bowie's passing that I decided to wear the Labyrinth shirt that I had that features him..and about two weeks later I did this Jareth, as well as Alan Rickman as Snape.  I might see about resetting my Etsy shop again and selling this piece, though it is one of my favorites and one of my best.

Book Review

I listened to the audio book on Hoopla. Great to listen to when knitting or any other things I tend to do..and I am surprised I wasn't sitting down to sketch dragons! Maybe on the next one. I am dragon crazy and this book really feeds into that. I love the title since it is a bit of a twist from Darwin's Beagle voyage. A very nice slide is Isabella being basically called a transgender..although the term Isabella used was transvestite. And the island local calling her a dragon spirit being..well...I can relate to that. I am also born in the year of the dragon so the fact I really connected to dragons made this book a fantastic read for me. I love the Victorian style of the piece and the audio book was well done. I've read the first two books and this was the first audio I listened to and it was very well done and this one on Hoopla had an interview with the author, nice!

The Voyage of the Basilisk

Loftus Hall Up the stairs slowly

At one point I had to white out a section of the railing because I had too much there and after I did that it looked better.  Was told oil is a very forgiving medium, I do love it so much more than watercolor though I have done some great watercolors and it was watercolors that I worked with all my life till I got into oils.

I still have a bit to work on but it is coming along fine, I'm just slowly doing the stairs because I am fixing it as I go up those things.

I also started on a sketch of Proveglia, haven't ordered my gesso board yet though.

On the left you can just barely see the demonic entity that is featured as Zack Bagins tat.

It's not totally detailed just a pencil drawing so it's hard to see when it was scanned

but the shot of Proveglia you can see is green.  My daughter thought it looked like it was on fire, green fire.

It will be interesting, I'm trying to capture the spiritual energy of the place and that is the vision that got to me when I thought of the place.

When I think of Waverly Hills Sanatorium I think of blues, more cold, sad and isolated than anything else.

I don't know what size Waverly Hills will be, I haven't found a shot yet to use as reference, I just know what colors best represent the place.

I have other art ideas apart from Ghost Adventures, it's just these three places speak so strongly I just had to paint them, after these three I don't know if I will do more, it all depends on what strikes me.

I can't wait to see the new episodes, been following Ghost Adventures Crew on Twitter.  

I don't get cable, just internet so I have to wait to catch episodes on Youtube. I want to eventually buy all the DVD's of their shows but my funds only go so far.  I'm not all starving artist here, it's just a limit on how much I can get what I want and when.  I'm just thankful I am well stocked on artist supplies, up till now I hadn't painted for two years.  I just need a new board for the Proveglia project, and I am going back to my old canvases to fix them. Like this one here.

I painted this one a few years ago and now I really HATE that tree on the left!!

In order to fix it I have to white it out.

I will paint over it in Titanium white to start over again and fix it.

Of course I KNOW I will have to touch up everything else and that will take time as I go over and think what to change.  

Mmmm I think there is way too much yellow, the staff needs a bit of work. I will start with the tree first and then things will just flow from there I know it.

I have done great work on redos

I also have ideas for new paintings

Ideas just feed off one another here.

How I love it!

There Be Dragons

Dragons are my favorite subject to paint or draw but I don't have a whole lot of them.

I take my time on my dragons and I have a hard time creating them.

This is from a sketch pad of practicing my dragons.  The lessons are from a book about dragonart

written by an artist known as neonDragon.  Very cool dragons, but got a strong Magna look to it.

But it did help me in figuring out the horns, the book showed how the skull  of a typical dragon looks like and how the horns set in.  That was one of my problems, making the horns realistic enough.  The next part was the wings and the limbs.  

Smokee the Dragon

This piece was done way before I even found that dragon art book.  The horns are a bit weak for me personally but many people I showed to on Kaboodle loved it and I decided to make it into a card

since I can't sell the original print, the edges of the Bristol drawing paper got really torn up but the picture itself stayed intact.  I also made a photo print and that came out well.  The above link takes you to the link for the card, I think it makes a great Gothic Birthday card.

This was originally a class assignment for drawing three at the community college I was going to.

The drawing teacher was a real cool guy but he said not to use the charcoal reversal drawing to do dragons.

He hated dragons, thought it was overdone.

Well I could not help but do a dragon in charcoal reversal, just my dragon was more subtle.

I got an A on it and he really REALLY liked how I did it.

I had one student how I got away with it.

I think I understood what he was tired of

which was the commercial designs of the dragons you see on posters and t shirts.

I grew up with my dad's Dragonriders of Pern books all around the house.

The dragons are a bit different from what is seen on t shirts, especially the newest book jacket artwork.

After working though that Dragon Art book I got a very good painting done of a dragon.

I don't see any Dragons

I really love how the wings turned out.  Some people had trouble seeing the dragon at first.  Yeah, the guy is a traveler and he was walking though a valley that is full of dragons.  He doesn't see any, because they are green and blend in with the hills.

There is a bit of a story to this work.  The guy is something of a hedge wizard, knows some small magics but can't always get the results he wanted, think of a more incompetent wizard like Schmendrick from the Last Unicorn.  He does more slight of hand.  The thing is though he has the potential for greater magic.

The dragon he stumbles on is a mage dragon, he can do magic.  

I don't remember too many stories of dragons with magic, maybe I'm not reading the right stuff.

Oh I remember Puff the magic Dragon, children's fantasy, and there is the PBS series Dragon Tales, but that's more recent.  I grew up watching the 80's Dragonslayer, the beast flew and had fire but no magic.

Pete's Dragon turned invisible.

A dragon series I read only one book of was of a race of dragon's that can turn into humans and stay in that disguise and live in the modern world.

Let's not forget Draco though, from Dragonheart, that is my inspiration for the above painting.

My husband has got a cool Magna show uh Lodos War or something like that.  Kind of like D&D with it's characters, got the hero, mage, a religious healer, a thief, a pretty and sassy elf girl and a gungh ho dwarf.  But it has a story line that is more complex and the character's are not flat..best piece of work I wish American's should take a lesson from.  Hate movies with weak story lines, Reign of Fire comes to mind.  Looked like a cool dragon movie but I fell asleep through it!

I want to see a dragon that is a more complex creature, not just a beast this fierce hunting intelligence.  Draco was a good start, but I want more, like a complex society of dragons.

OHHHH I forgot about this book series by Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton

uh the Elvenbane books, it has a society of  mage dragons.

Man where has my mind been!

Still, I haven't seen too much after that.

Or else I have been so busy raising my little 'dragonlings' that I have not kept up with the books coming out.