Anzushiro Dragon Valentine 2019

When I originally created the Draco Forma image of Anzushiro, I was immediately both captivated by and unsatisfied with the final product.

As I noted when I did the follow-up piece, the first version was lacking in several areas, most visibly in the relative shortness of her tail. There were other aspects, which the follow-up had addressed (her dragon claws for example, but the original piece didn’t show enough of her to be able to do anything with those aspects.

That being said, I did love the overall concept of the original. There was a certain innocence, playfulness, in the way she is sitting there looking back over her shoulder. It’s certainly one of the “cuter” images I’ve ever done.

Getting back to that image and polishing it up, the first priority obviously would be to fix those elements that were lacking. I made her wings slightly larger, so they would fit more with the follow-up. I also made the tail much, much, longer. Again, the idea was to make it something closer to the follow-up image and how long her tail appears in that one. This version, however, does a better job of tapering the tail towards its end. In the Draco Forma V2 image, her tail seems to reach a static width for a prolonged length, so it looks a little less like the tail of a dragon and more like a snake.

The other thing I did here was to give her a fang. A staple of any beast-kin or simply beast-like-personality anime characters is that one snaggletooth that looks like an overgrown canine poking out over their lower lip. In real life if you saw that you would either feel empathy for the person’s poor and likely painful dental health situation, or terrified by their inhuman mouth full of carnivore teeth. In anime, for whatever odd reason it does, cute characters, or characters trying to act cute, end up with this snaggletooth.

It’s slightly more in context here, although used for much the same reason. As a part dragon, it would make sense – as much as any of this “makes sense” – for her to have a mouth full of T-Rex teeth, and for one to protrude over her lower jaw to some degree. I also happened to stick something in her mouth to at least add that little bit of justification.

Seeing her sitting like this, imagining she is in a partially bestial sort of mindset at the moment, you imagine that like your pet dog or cat she would have something food or toy related in her mouth; a bone, some bird or mouse she caught, etc. Thinking about the prior completed Anzu project, the PreCure cosplay one, I thought about doing hearts in the background of this one. I then considered that a Valentine’s themed piece might be good here. So, I decided she should have a piece of heart-shaped chocolate in her mouth.

I then did the heart-shaped bed. The idea there started as a heart-shaped “something” like in the aforementioned PreCure themed project. That idea then changed to a cloud. Finally, I settled on a bed. I changed from the globule of magic idea because I didn’t want to just recreate that image’s background. I switched from cloud because I felt that I would need to change the way the dress she’s wearing would sit and wasn’t sure what that would look like or how to accomplish that. I suppose most folks wouldn’t notice such a detail in an already fantastical image, but that sort of thing can sometimes stick in my head and annoy me. It’s one thing if I know it’s wrong but I’ve given it a good shot, and another if I know it’s wrong and know I had no clue what I was even doing.

At any rate, once I decided on the heart bed and chocolates, it was a question of what more to do. I wanted to do something to sort of play her off as being a bit messy, so I wanted to have her covers and pillow be a little messy too. So, most of her blanket is falling off her tail and the bed, while pillow is also laying against her tail. You can imagine that she was sleeping a bit restlessly (probably jitters from too much sugar).
So that's Valentine's Day 2019. I do apologize it's a little late - as I said, she was a tad sleepy. Hope yours was good, and that you enjoy this piece. And a reminder, check out fanfiction.net for the new Geass R3 Alter story.