Moonlight Flight was an artwork I did recently that was meant to act as a kind of concept art for the main character in my book, The Diamondguard. Now, I've drawn this character, named Kiesse, plenty of times before, but anyone familiar with the writing process knows that things change a lot in the early stages of writing a book...or really any stage of writing a book haha. After getting a bit stuck, I decided to scrap the book and decided to start again, making some pretty big changes to the story, the world-building and the characters, which included Kiesse. I haven't actually drawn her since those changes were made, and that's where Moonlight Flight came in.
So for this concept art, I wanted to show off two things, which were the two big changes. The first was that all my dragons now have different elemental abilities, and Kiesse's had changed from fire (your typical dragon) to air, and I wanted to portray that in some way. since "air" is invisible, that's not as easy as it sounds, so i settled a some kind of flying scene.
The second factor I wanted portrayed in this piece was Kiesse's prosthetic wings. Through the events of the first book, Kiesse will loose her wings, and is the test subject for a new kind of prosthetic. I had some dialogue written out about the designs of the wings, and a few rough sketches, but this was the first full image of her wearing them I've drawn.
I fleshed out the design even more, tidying up the previously mentioned sketches after I finished this piece and put them together in their own thing later
I mentioned in my social media posts about the picture, that I decided to go lineless on this particular picture, since I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, and that is true, usually my dragons are much more cartoony, but I really wanted to at least attempt something a bit more realistic, and I really enjoyed the challenge, more than I expected, maybe in the future I'll do more like it!
If you're interested in checking out the process, you can watch this timelapse video! The total recorded time ended up being 28 hours, but as you'll probably notice, there was already a sketch and basic background by the time I started recording. The first few videos of the sketch and blockout of the background were unfortunately corrupted, so I lost what I estimated to be around 3-5 hours of footage. The footage is sped up to 40x the original speed.
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