How to Paint Your Dragon| Painting a Clay Dragon with Acrylics

In last week's installment, you saw me sculpting a dragon head with polymer clay and this week I'll show you how it was painted. The dragon artdoll for the St. George and the Dragon piece was painted with an acrylic palette of titanium white, yellow ochre, chromium oxide green, cobolt blue, ultramarine blue, phthalo green, and alizarin crimson. One note about phthalo green (or any pigment starting with "phthalo") and alizarin crimson's that both of these tones can quickly over-power a color mixture, so it is wise to add them in in tiny increments. When I'm painting my mixed media artdolls, I like to have a few base tones pre-mixed and then I just apply them to the various regions of the face, blend, realize I didn't like a given tone, paint over it- and so on and so on until I'm ultimately pleased with the paint job. When the painting process is going well, this can take 40 minutes... and when it's going poorly, over an hour and a half!

 

Watch Part 2 in the St. George & the Dragon Piece | Painting a Clay Dragon with Acrylics:

 

The majority of my future videos will focus on fantasy characters from mythology and folk-lore, I've got some fey characters lurking in my sketchbook waiting to be brought to life. I might consider doing fan art of characters I love, but I'm still not 100% sure I will- I'd love to make a Daredevil (and a bunch of the other Defenders characters) or The Rhino from Spider-Man (The Rhino's costume is just ridiculous!) or maybe if I do make them, I'll re-imagine them as fitting into more of a fantasy setting. What do you think? I'd also love to make the time to play around with stop-motion animation with my poseable art dolls.

 

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