Beautiful Destruction

UPDATE: I forgot to make this a fullview, so if you want to zoom in on those details, you can do this now xD

A gift to
This gift is my way of saying thanks to somebody who gave me a goal. Once i stumbled upon Fourth-Star's art on dA 2 years ago i immediately thought: "Oh my god, no way i can ever learn to draw like her", - and i've never believed in myself, never thought i can improve to reach the quality of art you see here....but i still kept trying and trying and i still have a lot of work to do in order to catch up to her. Fourth-Star was one of those artist that made me want to improve and each time i see her art i understand i need to work on something new, something challenging, something i've never done before, and sometimes it's not even art quality, sometimes it's the ideas. So by drawing this artwork, i thank her for giving me a purpose not only to be on this website, but also to draw in general.

Now, once this little intro has been dealt with, here's some info about this artwork.

I always struggle to imagine a good background, and this time was no different. I had three different settings in mind, each of them had a dragon flying (this is the first time i drew a flying dragon without using any reference by the way): 1) a dragon flying over a canyon 2) a dragon flying over a sea that had some weird glowing building showing up from under the water 3) a dragon flying over an island.
All those were not good enough, not original enough for me, i wanted the idea to absolutely blow Fourth-Star away... so i drew a random sketch, where i combined all 3 ideas into 1 single frame (and i didn't actually even notice that untill i was almost done coloring this piece). You can see a piece of an ocean, you can see that glowing building turned out to be an ancient artifact and the island is now renamed into D'Island. And of course i chose Fourth-Star's main character Skye.

So as you can see, Skye noticed some ancient artifact awoke on D'Island and is now trying to destroy everything. Well Skye just has to smile to every danger he encounters, cause there's never a problem he can't solve.

Just look at that huge crack in the ground (by the way, that's the part from the canyon bg idea i previously had)....what are we gonna do with that? Well before Skye get's on to destroy the damn thing, he has to stop staring at that beautiful beam of light and those shiny sparkly things inside its core, they tend to distract him...

Now what i'd like Shrimp to do is to really look at this artwork in zoom mode. Look closely at how many details i've put into this. You will see grass as far back as at the beachline, you will see some small detailing in the sand. You will see grass being highlighted and every single crack in the ground, every single scratch on those hovering stones, every single scale on Skye's body and every single fold on his wings being drawn manually. Almost every single pixel in detailed areas was drawn by hand, no filters used no custom brushes. I spent around 70 hours on this artwork and it was totally worth it. I performed 120% on this and i'm really pleased with the outcome (even though i didn't get his horns quite right, i'm a bit confused how to draw their new design).

I hope likes it.

And if you're not bored reading this text yet, then i challenge you to find a moustache in this artwork xD


Skye and D'Island (c)
Artwork (c) Me