I have wanted to do a dragon that had the pattern of a car tyre instead of scales for quite some time.
The idea fermented in my mind for some time until I finally decided to start experimenting. From the beginning I realized that the tyre pattern made more sense on the stomach instead of on the back of the dragon, as for the rest I wanted to give this dragon a biomechanical or at least mechanical appearance.
The dragons tattooed in the East, from which I took inspiration, are often accompanied by cherry blossoms (in Japanese tattoos cherry blossoms are actually everywhere 😀 ), but being a mechanical dragon they didn’t seem like the right fit. Ninja stars (Shuriken) were way more consistent with the project.
The hexagons in the background added a technological touch making the composition even more coherent.
Instead of adding the classic waves, flames or wind typical of Eastern tattoos, I opted for dynamic horizontal lines and finally decided to enrich the work with pieces of tyre that scatter away like a racing car on a turn – it is no coincidence that the type of tread I used comes straight from the wet tyres of Formula One cars of the 70s 😀 – making the image even more dynamic.
The pearl is the most important treasure for the dragon because it gives it wisdom, spiritual energy, prosperity and power so it didn’t seem appropriate to reinterpret this important and meaningful part of classical iconography.
As for colours, my first option was turquoise for the dragon and red for the background, with bright yellow/orange accents, but while sharing the progress of my work on social media, the project was immediately successful and it was reserved by a guy from Friuli even before the drawing was completed, so it seemed more than fair that I discuss colours with its future owner.
I sent him a brief description with the traditional colours of the dragons and their meanings; his first choice was obviously the most powerful dragon, the gold-coloured one, which apparently makes the wearer immortal, but working on such an extensive area with yellows would have been challenging as well as having little resistance over time, so we went for the direct descendant of the golden dragon: the red dragon.
For the background I decided to use a light turquoise, the contrast between complementary colors give to the image an appearance similar to that of an automotive design sketch, making my reinterpretation coherent with tradition but at the same time unique and modern 😉
Let me know what you think in the comments 😉
Below you can watch the working process of approx. 30 hours condensed into 16 minutes.