This is a short process article about how I draw my Dragon Knight Copic Marker illustration in five hours at Sablecon back in October 2023!

This a throwback to an older Copic Marker style that I rarely use but I can give you insight into the five hour process I spend drawing between sales and conversations with guests

This piece first started as a warm up on 9×12 Bristol Board, returning to an old Copic Marker style I did back in 2022 and it spun into a larger illustration. This dragon character came to me as another reason to draw flying character in more body types.

Using Warm Grey W0 and Dim Green G40 to sketch the preliminary body. I think I made a mistake using such a dark color like Dim Green for a lighter sketch, but I had to work with the mistake.

For this character, who I’ll name Olivia, I wanted to go for a Landsknecht type outfit to have wilder colors! I chose to make her a green dragon to work more with the greens I had. Light Blue and Ice Blue are solid starting choices for good armor colors with Cool Grey and the end to touch it up.

I wanted highlights for her armor so used Molotow Masking Fluid to keep the white of the paper. I knew it’s good for Watercolor paint, so Alcohol Marker should be no issue either. Once I finished the colors I wanted, I use a Rubber Eraser to clean it off.

Despite beginning the sketch with markers, I still made pencil sketches my SketchWallet to figure out the hair. I saw an attendee at Sablecon with an interesting mohawk and I wanted to give Olivia this hair.

I made more earlier sketches to get better at figuring out Olivia’s body type and costume. Landsknecht have complicated outfits and even as of writing this I still don’t like the design and the colors as much as I’d like to.

Dumbly enough, after I finished the marker drawing, I made a second sketch on my clipboard. The tough perspective didn’t convey Olivia’s size for me and I wanted a side view to figure out her body. There’s still that bad habit of cutting off winged characters to not see the enough of the wings in flight.

For most of the time, I was worried I messed up the drawing and I wanted to scrap it and start again. Leaving my work unfinished is and annoying habit that I want to break more often, so I stuck this out.

I want to do more with this character in the future as all the other characters I make up and I need to get to some real comics again.

I’m all over the web showing my daily drawings and practice sketches! If you have any questions, comments, or just wanna to say hi, I’m on Blue Sky, Instagram, and Twitch!