Mommy Dragon---"Jul'eweisa"

It was time to make a companion piece to 'Daddy Dragon,' without changing the basic format. Like that picture, this isn't an official novel illustration although both adult dragons are major players in my forthcoming novel sequence.

It was also a convenient Valentine's Day for my wife, Kathy (One of several! Roses, etc. Tight finances make me frugal, but I'm not THAT bastardly cheap ). This also presented the perfect opportunity to go all-pencil again for the first time in many months. I tried to move quickly with this picture (I had to meet the Elftown Valentine's Day 2005 contest with it), and I finished it in about 25% of the time 'Daddy Dragon' took. This is because either (1.) My skills have improved, to a degree (and I was working on ink/Prismacolor pictures at the same time), or (2.) I got too lazy, and winged it a little as the deadline neared. I tend to agree with (1.) although there's plenty of evidence pointing to (2.). I ran out of time to draw the third hatchling, so I'll say this picture took place a few centuries before 'Daddy Dragon', a little earlier in the novel sequence. (In book One, which I am just about finished writing, Jul'eweisa has only been pregnant with hthe first hatchling, for a brief period.) Convenient? Absolutely. But it makes sense, sort of. My dragons, who are nearly immortal and are the fertile nadir (if Pernese dragons are the fertile zenith) of dragons, take a LONG time to reproduce. It takes the better part of a century for one (90%) or two (10%) dragonets to gestate inside their mother. The egg is laid, and hatches two weeks later.

Anyhow, enough of the babbling. I'm not totally satisfied with this picture because (1.) It was rushed. And (2.), I seem to have forgotten a few pencil techniques I was using just a few graphite renderings ago!

But do you know what? Kathy loved it, and gave me a special sort of Valentine's Day 'thank you'.

^____~


Therefore, I like it, glitchy hatchlings and all.

Roses are so overrated. ;-P