Dragons ahoy, a fun day watercolour painting with my daughter. Plus bonus digital variations.

Hey all you lovely Steemians :-)

My work runs a creative challenge every month and strangely the topic lined up exactly with some art my daughter wanted to make.
So I thought we could both do abit of painting. The topic had been dragons, something that I've always found fun to paint and draw. Looks like my kido thinks the same :-)

She wanted to paint a water dragon in watercolours. So I followed her lead and also used the same watercolour paints.

Kido is Learning

Being 8 years old she wanted a few pointers. Which is always nice passing on skills you learnt through the years to the next generation :-)

Here she learnt to use less paint and more water, and if she puts to much on she can still correct her painting. She also discovered that mistakes can become part of process and character of water colour painting.

Reference, inspiration and learning from the masters.

She worked from an existing dragon image, painting from a picture of dragon made of water. She wanted to see if water colours would actually help her paint creatures made of water.

My own approach was to take various references of crocodiles and alligators and build a more realistic anatomy of a dragon head. If crocodiles evolved in to dragons kinda thing.

Mediums used

We used a cheap set of water colour paints, I left my Windsor and Newton set somewhere... In a box ..I think and like wise with my brushes. So I used her cheap glue brushes. But hey an artist's doesn't blame their tools right? Thankfully we had some heavy watercolour paper kicking around though. I finished the painting with pen and ink alongside a white pen, for outlines and highlights.

Our final traditional paintings. Digital to follow.

Meet Mr Dracodilygatorgon

This is my daughter's very own handy work :-) proud moment for me of course.

A Few Digital step further.

I tried a few experiments with my dragon. Using some of the newer machine learnt image filters that are all the rage these days. In the case I wanted to see if I could use these artistically to help enhance my original image.
Using the mobile app Prisma, I style transferred a lizard image on to my art work.

This created the following image.

Which I could then layer on top of my original piece after some processing in Photoshop.
Resulting in a really cool dragon/lizard scale effect.

For fun I tried a few more styles, it's mind blowing to see how well some of these work and even a few that look like my other painting styles. With great power comes great responsibility.

Looks just like I painted it on my iPad by hand.

The future for traditional, digital and AI powered art mashups is super interesting that's for sure. For me I just love mixing traditional media and technology :)
Most important of all though is inspiring my daughter to continue painting and to think outside the box.

Thanks for viewing everyone :)

Cheers
Nick aka @niko3d

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