The Red Dragon is my favorite among all the dragons in the game simply because of the nostalgia the name has for me. There used to be a freestyle football brand that made balls specifically for freestyle tricks. It was called reddragon. I loved the brand and automatically I am biased towards Red Dragon in Splinterlands.
I love the stats on this card and whenever I get the chance to play with I simply enjoy it way too much. Melee and magic is a good combo. It is pretty tanky and even in level 1, it has very good stats.
Lore: There are several living Dragons of the red bloodline, but the largest of them can always be found outside the Centrum city walls. In the soft sand of the Draykh-Nahka desert, he lays and rolls, conditioning his scales. He breathes a greater fire than any living Dragon, but his scales have become soft, a result of the cursed Burn. This Dragon is also known for his quick temper, and should only be approached with extreme caution (and flameproof armor).
I used Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Krita to complete this piece. Since Red Dragon heals from level 3, I pictured him growing his scales back. So, I wanted to give him realistic scales with good shadings.
I also wanted to give him a proper shading on the face and neck since Red Dragon's flames are "the brightest".
Here I am using Falcon talons and Iguana skin to produce the scaling effect on the dragon's skin. To make the Red Dragon even more realistic I divided most of its body into different layers.
Each layer has different contortions so I laid the falcon talons separately on each part of the body and warped them to give them the contorted look.
I tried my best to leave the larger scales on parts of the body that had fewer folds and smaller or tighter scales on the parts of the body that would need more folds to move properly.
This is what it looked like after preliminary shading and recoloring. I drew an outline to guide me into picturing the whole image more clearly.
I want to give him more shades in parts that will be "behind" other structures. That means the back wing, the insides of the front wing, the underbelly. Then I want to give him the bright reflection of the flame on his face, neck, and teeth, as well as the front leg.
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I am still not very good with photoshop and layers so I had to recreate some structures from scratch. Like this part of his belly.
I took some inspiration from other animals like the bat for the wings. Initially, I wanted to add some texture to the inside of the wing but then I left it with simple black and white shading as it looked more aesthetically pleasing.
I layered each segment of the wing to color them white, then merged them and shaded them to give them some depth.
Finally, I redrew most of the lines on the inside for more legibility and added a few more shades of yellow where the bright reflection of the fire would be.
Then I darkened some of the scales and added white and black shades wherever I thought needed more clarity. Since there is so much texture marked with black, it was tricky to find the right amount of shading and the color.
Then I swapped the original fire for something more realistic. I found this fire the most visually pleasing and layered it a couple of times to get the right spread.
Fire always comes with smoke (I guess) so I added a few yellow, red, orange, and grey clouds to the back to give it a more "explosive" feel.
Initially, I decided to go with this picture. It has a lot going on in the background and shows the craziness of the Red Dragon and is a metaphor for the chaos it ensues.
However, after a few runs on Krita, I decided that the PNG with a transparent background with splashes of different colors and a black mist fits the Red Dragon's lore more precisely.
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