A nice dragon

[malymin]

It's hard to find good, free-to-use dragon art sometimes, but here's a cute feathered dragon.

Source is this Deviantart submission by a user named BasiliskZero. Published February 18, 2012.

Artist commentary:

I just stumbled upon this buried in some old folders.

I had plans for these lines, grand plans, but honestly I'm NEVER going to get around to using them for their intended purpose(mostly cuz I apparently can't draw this species more than once...).

So here they are for your use as char references, adoptables, whatever.

Free lineart rules:

• You may color and/or edit this
• You may make adoptables with this
• You may attempt to sell what you color for "points" or "gold" on any site
• You may not sell or redistribute this lineart
• You may not sell adoptables made with this lineart for real money
• Credit(a simple link is preferred) is nice, but not necessary.

In addition, the artist has more free lineart here.

Comments

[stepnix]

It's really cool how natural the fuzz and feathers look on this dragon design. A lot of the time they look more intentionally playing against type (which is also cool), but here i had to look for a few moments before i even realized something was less-conventional

[malymin]

I feel like a lot of feathered dragons I see these days almost... make too big a deal out of being feathered? "I've IMPROVED dragons by making them more like dinosaurs, which means FEATHERED like BIRDS" is an attitude I see a lot in creature design enthusiasts on tumblr (both original species and redesigns of dragon species from media franchises), to the point of creating dragons that basically just look like griffins with velociraptor tails. Straight up have seen people who play dragon virtual pet game Flight Rising, say reptilian dragons are boring and ugly and birds are intrinsically more cool and interesting for being "real flying reptiles."

(There are "mostly bird"/"basically a griffin" dragons I like, truth by told, but usually I like them more as original designs than as "fixes" for existing dragons.)

At the same time, on the other hand, a lot of feathered dragons kind of just have their feathers... slapped on. Bird wings on a scaly (or furry, if playing against type in that respect also) beast, maybe with some long decorative feathers on the head or tail, in the fashion of a fantasy-world version dinosaur. ("JP scaly raptor but with a cockatoo crest" is basically its own creature design trope at this point.) A fun look, but it can often feels just like like any other animal-but-with-bird-wings chimera. Like, "an angel dragon" more than "a feathered dragon", you know what I mean? A good look in its own right, but kind of on the more "unnatural magic being" side of dragony than the "almost a plausible animal in its own right" end.

This dragon is very chimerical in a common fashion for dragons - it's got elements of mammals and birds, arguably more of both than any actual reptile elements - but it has a lizardy, snakey kind of head that nonetheless feels natural on the body of the whole. It has a bare underbelly, a sort of downy proto-feathered fluffy back like a pterosaur, and then shifting up towards the spine into full feathered wings, creating a sense of integument sort of moving in a gradient from sparse to simple to complex. It feels like the kind of creature you'd encounter in a story where "dragons" have evolved on an alien planet like Pern, or from some some weird unexpected branch of earth life. Not a dragon in the absolute most traditional sense, but strongly enough resembling a Classic Dragon that the first human who sees it is astonished by the resemblance. You know?

[stepnix]

yeah!!! Real strong design