This week, I’m taking some time to dive into a custom I recently finished. This was for a peacock-dragon hybrid that had more realistic ties to a peacock instead of drawing inspiration from a peacock and applying it as necessary.
By the way, peacocks are so difficult to get good reference photos of. They have so many things going on with all their prettyness, but I felt like I needed pages of photos to get enough angles to capture all of the details.
I started with a classic peacock palette: a deep blue; a bright green; a bright, light blue; a darker green; and gold. Most of these colors were created for the feathers.
I ended up mixing a darker blue for facial accents, and added a dark brown for the eye colors, white for around the eyes, and a medium brown for the wings. Lots of colors went into this guy to keep him as realistic as possible.
The basic shape of the dragon was pretty straightforward. I kept it like my other dragons and used the deep blue as the base color.
Then it was time for the feathers.
I’ve only made canes a couple of times before, and they make me a little anxious, but luckily this one turned out okay. I may do a blog post tutorial in the future for making a cane, but for now I’ll just outline what I did.
It starts with making a larger, more manageable build up of layers in the desired shape. A peacock feather is at least a fairly simple shape with some extra layers added of the light blue and gold to bulk them out.
The hard part is shrinking it down. My cane started out at about 1.5″ at its widest point and about 2″ long.
When I was finished shrinking it down, it fit on my fingertip.
Then it was off to building up the tail! I worked from the tip of the tail up to the body, starting with the cane of feathers and then changing to solid colors transitioning from green to the bright blue, stopping about halfway up the body. Each feather was textured to help make them a little more realistic. They were then brushed with white pearl ex powders to give them the shine that peacock feathers have.
I was originally going to do more dragon style wings, but I decided to further commit to the other realistic details, so I textured some wings and filled it in with white paint.
To finished everything off, I added a layer of glaze, and this peacock dragon was complete! I love how it turned out, and I think it was a good mix of peacock and dragon.
What’s your favorite bird?