December, 2004. Work-in-progress and comparison shots of my Darkness elemental dragon. As you can see, Darkness has gone through a major evolution since his previous forms. I don't know where the idea came from to make him appear a three-headed dragon, but I'm glad I did just that.

Moreover, I decided to make Darkness as a hand-drawn negative, performing all my shading in reverse and inverting the result digitally. His scales proved an interesting challenge of their own, since in order for them to appear properly when inverted, I had to shade them in reverse as well. So instead of layering an undercoat and following it up with a darker scale pattern, I patterned the scales in first using white colored pencil, then applied a light layer of undertone over it, filling in the areas which the white patterning did not already cover. The result? Wow.

For a larger view of the finished version, see here.