Justin Gerard
patreon
LET’S DRAW REAL-LIFE DRAGONS
🕑 Added 2018-09-07 23:42:01 +0000 UTC Drawing from life is hard. And drawing from life that insists on being alive and wandering off is even harder.
But it can be highly rewarding as well. There is a wealth of information that you glean from direct observation that you just can’t get any other way. (Like that someone taught that miniature monkey over there how to make obscene gestures.)
But also more useful things like how reptiles breath, how they interact with one another, how they act when they are startled, or how they sit with jaws open in order to cool off (and not in the hopes that I will carelessly step there.)
These drawings were done at a reserve called Alligator Adventure, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This reserve is home to one of the largest crocodiles in the world, “Utan.” (pictured above) Utan is 20 feet long and weighs 1 ton. He is in his own spacious exhibit, because he ate everything else.
He is a genuine monster, a horror from another age. In other places in the world his kind allegedly still kill more humans than any other predatory animal on the planet.
I doubt this chicken wire would really do much if he really decided he wanted to eat me, it looks like it’s a screen door he might accidentally trip through on his way to the restrooms. But as you can see, I’m not worried at all. This is because I am wearing my sweet camo hat, which renders me pretty much invisible to him.
Here we have the head done, and then Utan decided he’d like a swim. This was inconvenient, but you don’t argue with 20 foot crocodiles.
So I moved on to the smaller lizards:
These juvenile alligators, like the juveniles of other species, could not sit still for more than 30 seconds. Drawing them proved fruitless.
Here we were able to catch a tail, and that is all.
Still there were fascinating tidbits that now get filed away for future projects on enormous, man-eating reptiles. How the water moves around them as they submerge is particularly fascinating.
This alligator didn’t like the way I was looking at him. That, or he didn’t like my sweet camo hat. Either way, he eventually had enough and made a break for it. But not before I snapped a photo which I would later use to cheat and fill in all the missing details. Justin: 1, Alligator: 0
This guy knew that I knew that he knew that I knew that he was there and that he was NOT a log. I watched him slide into the water for crying out loud. But that didn’t stop him from slowly drifting up to the edge and pretending to be a log. We all knew the game, and he knew that sooner or later, I would have to cross the water to get back to my car. And in my haste I’d forget that he wasn’t a log.
But I knew a little secret called, “using the bridge.” Take that nature.
Final Score: Justin: 2, alligator: 0
Comments
Justin Gerard
Savina that is a great idea! I am actually working on a revised version of this chapter for my Drawing Dragons book, and when I finish that I will repost it here on Patreon in PDF form like the new ones. I agree that in a lot of situations the PDFs are just easier to use, particularly on the phone or if you are old school like me and actually print these things out!
Savina Francisco
Hey Justin, since I imagine I'm not the only newbie to your Patreon, might you be willing to make these amazing guides into .pdfs like you have set up later ones and repost them as new posts to your Patreon? This and the posts from the same month about illustration parts 1 & 2 have some really great info & I just happened to stumble across them when I came to your Patreon on my computer rather than my phone (it's really hard to go back to see old posts on the phone app - it just keeps throwing me back to the newest posts). That would also give you a break from making new content! lol :) :) Even if you didn't want to make them into .pdfs, doing "flashback posts" would be really helpful for new members!
