✨A Nebula Dragon is Born

Howdy Folks,

Last week we wrapped up “The Celestial Dragonarium” crowdfunding campaign. Needless to say, the whole venture was an overwhelming success. We’re super thankful for all the faith and support from the backers and the other creators of the Oddities & Obscura group.

The Nebula Dragon

During the campaign, we ran a poll to which space dragon backers want to bring to life. The vote went overwhelmingly to the Nebula Dragon at 49%. So we got to work!

See the Poll here!

The inspiration: Glorious Illuminating stardust!

In these thumbnails, I wanted to capture a creature that could flow through the nebula clouds freely with long flowy shapes.

With this as a jumping off point, I drew a quick sketch.

Commonly, a piece will look great during the sketch phase. Then when we get to inking, the lines lose their abstract shapes and become solid. It’s here where we often find anatomy mistakes and incorrect assumptions about the form. Sometimes, the piece simply doesn’t feel right. It can be a combination of elements. This time was no different. Back to the drawing board.

We didn’t have much time to spare and so to fix it I had to redraw the underlying mannequin before redoing the lineart.

For some perspective, the Celestial Dragonarium was a project we thought about and made designs for over the course of about a year. The Nebula Dragon in comparison was designed in about a week.

Ryan color picked from reference photos to create a few mockup designs. We discussed and moved colors around until we had one that we liked. We eventually went with “Sprit Oracle” shown below.

This ethereal dragon uses its many wings to glide effortlessly through the swirling clouds of dust and gas found commonly in nebulae.

While discussing color, we go over possible effects of the pin that might fit. We decided this Nebula Dragon will be 3 inches with gold plating and lots of swirling pearl effects in the wings. I can’t wait to see how she turns out. Its dark starry center will have mixed in glitter to add stars to it’s nebula.

While I was creating Eternal Nebula, I couldn’t separate myself from the idea of what a black hole dragon looked like. A star’s beginning meets it’s end. It only made sense to create that symmetry. So I doodled away and made this sinister void beast of a friend.

We look forward to showing this design’s process in a future update. 

For now, thank you for reading!

We’ll see you next time,

Arielle + Ryan