EVA Foam Dragons - Part 2

Colouring Big Red 

The original article for this followed my process for colouring in the large red dragon. Unfortunately, it was held on Google+ and vanished along with everything else.

I do not have the original text any more, but I did find the pictures...

By the end of Part 1, the Red Dragon looked something like this.

Colouring is all done with felt tip marker pens, mainly Sharpies as these come in a nice range of colours. I have some Spectrum Noir and Letratone pens too as well as pound shop permanent markers.  Use what ever you have. If you can find some metallic or gel pens they can be handy for adding some sparkle. You can use watercolour markers too, but they will need a long time to dry so need fixing when you are finished.

Colouring always start with the lightest colours and layer up with increasingly darker colours. Yellow, orange, pink, red, brown, purple. Depending on the sort of pens you use, you may find colours blending as you work. When you get it right, this can be very effective!

I usually start by sketching out the bone structure for the wings.
Use a light colour first. I used Yellow here.
This will be coloured over as it develops.

Start sketching in the wing fibres between the bones. 

Then thicken them out with stronger colours. Orange here

Then reds using darker colours and lengthening the lines to fill out the wings and body.

Darker reds, browns or purples to emphasise shadows close to the bones and body.
You can use lighter colours on top of the the earlier layers to fill out the uncoloured parts of the wings.

This was most of the wings and body done.

The head was done later, then I took the legs off as they just looked wrong. 

By the time I had finished it looked like this...

A similar process was used with the large Green Dragon working from a yellow base material.

As my Dragons were intended to be seen from above, I don't usually do much with the undersides.
For the green I used the underside as a palette to reference the different coloured markers.

Chris Nicole - 24th June 2021