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OrmIrian — Hazelnut Dragon
Published: 2012-11-05 09:25:36 +0000 UTC; Views: 3161; Favourites: 135; Downloads: 35
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Description
The hazelnut dragon feed on, like its name indicates, hazelnuts. Since it would need rather flat and strong tooth to be able to eat the hazelnuts, this dragon have quite a lot molar teeth, rather than sharp long ones like carnivore dragons often have them. It also have cheeks, so it would be able to chew its food before swallowing it. Since the hazelnuts have a rather hard shell, they use a quite interesting method to open these nuts: They fly high spotting a stone or something equal hard on the ground and let the nuts drop. Most of them would break on the ground.This picture visualizes a hazelnut dragon preparing for winter during autumn. It would collect as much hazelnuts or other long durable edibles as possible, similar to what some of our animals do before winter (e.g. squirrels).
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Comments: 38
A lot of people draw their dragons *big* but I find this to be a nice and original concept. (Really, kinda like a dragon squirrel 
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Thanks!
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Congratulations! Your deviation has been featured in our latest journal for entering our Autumn Air Contest, you have also been awarded 10 DeviantArt points!
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I love the concept, and the design is adorable <3
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Very nice! Is he like a pocket size dragon you can carry around?
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Hehe, well, maybe, if you can tame it
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Very nice illustration! love the design, looks kind of like a Triceratops with his little beak, a tiny flying squirrel dragon, would be awesome if such a creature did exist, guess we have to
live with regular lizards and "squirrels".
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Thank you 
Ah well, some of our lizards are quite interesting as well and also look quite like a dragon, except they lack the wings of course.
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Indeed, the concept of a dragon seems so natural to us humans,
so much so that it just seems sad that none exist.
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Maybe genetic engineering can create one for us one day
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I wonder if they haven't already created a strange mix of creatures, with the Platypus.
That creature is certainly a science experiment.
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Haha, yeah, it's really the weirdest animal on this planet we know about
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It is aye, I've always found Platypus fascinatingly strange creatures.
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This is so cool! I love the description, its a really well thought up concept. I love how the dragon stands out amongst the red-ish autumn hues
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Awesome dragon and story concept. Look forward to seeing more of your work
Great job!
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Thanks a lot! I'm glad you like the description of the dragon as well
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I wonder how effective dropping hazelnuts from a height would be. It could take a few tries. Hopefully these little guys are persistent.
What a cute little dragon! I like the changes you made from a typical dragon mouth to make this creature more fit for the food that it eats.
You did a good job with this drawing. It looks rather realistic, though still in your style. You were able to achieve a lot of good detail without looking like you spent forever on the whole thing. A bit more motion blur in the wings could look neat. I know they're already out of focus as it is, but I can imagine a small creature like this would be flapping its wings very fast, and you'd have to be extremely lucky to get a picture with the wings as stationary as they are.
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Well.. I guess it may fail a few times (since they aren't that heavy after all..), but since those creatures are quite smart, they surely find another way to open the nuts.. like dropping a heavy stone on them
I started to draw them as 'normal' dragons with the typical head, but after a few thought on this, I decided to go for this variant, since they don't feed on meat which certainly would change some anatomical things.
Thanks! 
Hmm, you're right about the wings, I see what I can change there, so it looks more like it's in motion
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That would be really funny to see. I can just imagine a frustrated hazelnut dragon who has a nice pile of rocks it has dropped that all missed the nut it wanted to eat. XD
I think it was really clever of you. The beak-like mouth makes sense, but I never would have thought about the need to add cheeks.
I did notice that about this picture, a lot of it looks more smooth than your drawings in the past. I like this style, it still looks really detailed but it's a bit less visually distracting to look at.
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Haha, yeah, that would be funny XD
Well, I thought most herbivores actually have cheeks- because their food is more though to digest than meat. Some animals even swallowed stones, so they can further break up the plants. Or even have several stomachs like a cow for instance. I try to think about those things as well when drawing, but I admit that I mostly forget about it as well
Yes, it's a faster style.. a lot faster than my previous one and it makes it also easier to add more complex backgrounds which doesn't need the insanely amount of detail to fit to the characters... and I kind of like the smooth look
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It's a good habit to be in. A sign of a good artist.
What do you do differently with this style?
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Basically I try to concentrate more on the 'form' of the dragon/creature, giving it a most basic shading first. Then I try to overwork the anatomy (something I probably always tried to ignore so far) then I already start to refine the whole thing a bit- smudge all the brush strokes in the back/-foreground. After finished with all this, I start to add details on a separate layer. Separate, so it's easier to change opacity and stuff like that (though I always end up merging the detail layer with the basic layer).
Then I will refine the whole feeling of the picture. Like few spots which are too dark/bright or have the wrong color.
Before, I did the detail phase without really overwork the dragons/creatures anatomy which sometime turned out horrible and I needed to change everything later on- with having to delete all the pretty details 
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That sounds like a good way to do it. You give yourself enough to work with so that you can see the concepts and forms you will be drawing, but you don't start to refine the drawing until you are satisfied with the anatomy.
When you do the details, do you go over the whole image just once or do you need multiple runs over the picture to get progressively more detailed?
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Though I'm really not that great when it comes to anatomy 
Well, usually I do the details in one go. I start at a certain point (most likely the head) and continue there. I might round up a few things in the end (like the overall feeling of the picture), but I usually don't add any more details after the 'first wave'
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I have the same kind of problem with anatomy. Sometimes I can see that something is right, but I have no idea what "correct" anatomy would look like. I really should do some anatomy studies, but I'm just not a serious enough artist to put that much work into it. Instead I try to learn by studying other peoples' art. Not as useful, but... it's something.
I sometimes struggle to be consistent with my details if I try to do them all at once... I might make things very detailed at the start but then begin to get tired of spending so much time on the drawing and do a poorer job later on. I think I tend to do my details in several waves, but that's mostly just an ideal that I aim for. In practice, I rarely have the patience to go over a picture completely a second time.
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Haha, yeah, I also find myself trying to learn from other artists.. not that helpful, since they probably also did some mistakes, but hey, better than nothing
For quite a long time I thought using references is something "evil", but it obviously isn't. It's just helpful.
Well, yes. I know this feeling very well, being tired to work on a picture you started to detail. That's why I needed almost 1.5 years for finishing "Together"
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Yeah, I know what you mean, sometimes it feels like it's almost shameful to use references. A bit silly, isn't it? On the other hand, I sometimes feel too lazy almost to use references, just because it can be so hard to find a picture that looks like it would be a good reference. Or maybe there's a bit of pride involved - we want to be able to say we created something entirely ourselves, and made it true to nature without relying on nature to do so. But you don't become that good by not using references the whole way. XD
1.5 years... 
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Yeah.. It takes also quite some time to find the references you looking for
Well, if you go for a realistic style there is no way around references- or at least looking at things in real life really close. You can't draw realistic if you don't know how 'realistic' looks like
Yes, I can't usually begin something new while being busy with another picture.. Sad reason why I didn't upload any new picture for around 1.5 years
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I have the same problem, I have over 4000 pictures on my computer which I could use for references, but good luck trying to find a particular picture in that bunch. I tried to sort through them all, once. That didn't work out very well.
Well, that makes perfect sense, since Together took you 1.5 years. XD
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Well, I have some basic order on my computer.. like black dragons, white dragons and so on... But even in these sub folders there are way too many pictures to look at
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It's also hard to make a folder of just the best pictures, or the best ones for reference, because they all fit into this category. XD
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