The Dragon Tamers (Animation Project)

The Dragon Tamers is a short story by E. Nesbit, written in the early 20th century. I first read it in the book The Book of Dragons, which was a collection of dragon related short stories, illustrated by Michael Hague. (Who also illustrated The Hobbit, Wind in the Willows and The Wizard of Oz among others)
The story involves a dragon who turns into a cat by eating nothing but bread and milk and becoming quite tame in the process. That was my idea for the theme of transformation, which I decided to tackle literally. I wanted a stop motion feel for the gif, so I created the images out of shapes and repositioned them, saving as a different jpeg every time.

You can read the full story here: LINK

Vector Self-Portrait

I wanted to be happy with this, but I just really don't like how the face came out. And as much as I tried to fix it I can't wrap my head around realism. Oh well. 

Visual Poetry

So sticking with the fantasy theme I seem to have for all of my art, I chose one of my favorite childhood movies, Flight of Dragons. The beginning of the movie has a theme song written and sung by Don Mclean, famous for American Pie. I chose the lyrics of that song as my poem, since I'm terrible at poetry and can't stand half of it anyway. I then hand traced a still from the first scenes of the movie, during which the song is sung, with the pen tool. I was able to then fill the tracings with text by putting the text into Illustrator and exporting them as jpegs which I would then create patterns out of for the fill tool to use. 

Dragons are cool.