How To Draw A Dragon Serpent

 Drawing a dragon serpent is easy to do once you have the basics of a dragon mapped out in your mind, a serpent is slightly different from a true dragon as there are no wings, so all you are left with is a huge serpent like body and the rest is considered a dragon with it's similar features and lizard like dragon scales for skin.

Here, though a dragon serpent can also be referenced from a Chinese dragon or even a Japanese style dragon, without wings and certainly the influence of these wingless dragons have been used in tattoos and other media which depict these quite popular dragon designs.

In the following slideshow, you can see the four steps I took to draw this particular dragon serpent and there is definitely more to drawing dragons than one drawing tutorial, so consider this one of many that I'll eventually create on the subject of dragons.

The first steps of drawing a serpent dragon is to sketch out a rough form, like I have done in the first sketch, which just shows the rough shape of the dragons head and a long winding curve that will be the serpents body and then I've marked out the shoulders of the arms and the top parts for the legs, this is just to see whether they would look okay as I've marked them in and they do look ok.

The second sketch was more on giving a little definition to the serpent dragons body on the arms and the legs and sort of filling out the form and structure of it's entire body, this was done on a lightbox, where I drew over the initial draft drawing and then rubbed out the previous pencil lines to make it look like the drawing had advanced, I didn't want to leave the first pencil lines in or else it would have confused somewhat.

The third sketch was primarily more focused on bringing in more detail on the face of the dragon and other details like claws, horns and spines on it's back, this is where you see the drawing coming together now and it really does look like a dragon serpent.

The fourth drawing is just the final inking stage in which I attempt to finish the drawing and create lots of detail as you can see with all of those intricate dragon scales which overlap.

When trying to draw something like this, never look at it and feel daunted, because although this is my attempt, you may go in a totally different direction because that's the nature of art it can be interpreted as each persons individual artistry, so always look for the bottom line and that's how you approach the drawing in your own way and if you mess up, then try again and just be inspired to draw and practice everyday.