This is a new drawing of mine created for @jacinta.sevilla's Drawing With a Twist art contest. The twist of this contest was to create an illustration for a story, rather than a piece of art based on a specific theme like most art contests on Steemit.

The illustration was made for this story:

A story by Bar Yosipovich

The story begins with a Samurai, during his 20s he served fighting his Emperors wars. Among 3000 of the Emperors samurais, he was one of the remaining 10. As an honour and for his old age he was given a mansion and a young wife as a gift for his loyalty and service all those years.

One day, the mansion caught fire while he was away. The samurai, seeing it from afar he rushed back to the burning mansion. It was too late when he reached the place; he found only the corpse of his wife and what was supposed to be his child.

In his grief he held the body close to him and it suddenly turned into ashes and from it, a small dragon came forth.

The new young emperor came to his aid and when he saw the dragon he wanted it for himself. The samurai refused and fought the emperor’s guards and escaped with the dragon.

They flee from the emperor, from Japan and went to other foreign and strange lands travelling across Asia and meeting adventure and escaping from other enemies in China who chased the samurai knowing he is the emperor’s soldier.

Many nation wars took place and they faced battles with creatures like the giant war elephants of Thailand and the giant wolf of Mongolia and travelling to new places like India, Taiwan, Mongolia and the Philippines.

A Dragon and a Samurai

Ink and Coloured Pencil on Paper
12" by 9"
February 4, 2018

I tend to avoid working in colour, at least in colour from my own imagination... For an artist, I don't think I have very good colour sense so I try to avoid it whenever possible, but I thought I would challenge myself to work in a style other than my usual for this contest.

1. It began with an idea

After reading the story, I knew I wanted to draw the dragon rising from the ashes in the hands of the Samurai. So I began by drawing a quick sketch of my concept.

2. Fine-tuning

Of course, the next step was then to transfer my design to my good drawing paper and refine it.

3. Inking the lines

Next, I further refined the design by inking the lines with a fine-point Sharpie. There was no going back after this step unless I wanted to start over. That's always stressful, but I think the line art turned out very nice.

4. First colour pass

Like I said, colour stresses me out because I don't think I'm very good at it. I did the first pass of colour lightly to choose my hues. Later I would do a second colour pass to add detail and additional shading.

5. Voila!

And of course, you've already seen the final piece. It didn't turn out exactly as I imagined it, and unfortunately I don't have time to finish it to my standards, so I have to accept that it is what it is.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my art and read my post. Wish me luck on the contest!

~Seth