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UPDATE: Voting has concluded. Tying for 4th place, I received an "honorable mention." Thanks so much to all who voted for me!

~~~

UPDATE: Voting to determine the winners of the "Summer's End" contest ( fav.me/d94yh6y ) hosted by Dragon-Fanatics has officially begun, and I need your help! I am asking all my lovely loyal fans, all my wonderful watchers, and all my fantastic friends, please, please vote for my entry! Or if you have added this piece to your "favourites," please consider voting for this piece in the contest as well. I would be very grateful!

Please VOTE ON THIS POLL: --> dragon-fanatics.deviantart.com…

Please vote for me by Tuesday, October 20th, 2015. Thank you so, so very much, to each and every one of you!

~~~

This is my entry for the contest at Dragon-Fanatics . The theme is "summer's end," and the objective is to answer the question, "How would a dragon (or your own character) celebrate the end of Summer?" So in answer to the question, here's my train of thought:

When I think of the end of summer, the obvious annual event that comes to mind is "back to school." (Ugh, right?) But for almost every year of my young life, such a thought was the polar opposite of anything celebratory… except for the very final portion of my formal education, when I had the privilege of spending the Michaelmas (Autumn) term studying abroad at the University of Oxford in England. So I thought I'd make a little dragon character that sort of represents me, in a sense, my "fursona," if you will. So here she is, reading a thick old book, wearing her official Trinity College scarf, and posing in front of the iconic Radcliffe Camera, truly eager about the start of her college term.

To create this piece, I used my own photos that I (and my husband) took (with our own cameras) of the Radcliffe Camera as a reference for illustrating the background. As you may have seen/heard/read my complaining before, I hate drawing backgrounds/buildings and I know they're not my strong suit, but I gave my drawing of this building the best I could give it—exclusively done with soft chalk pastels. On a separate sheet of paper, I drew the dragon using my ink brush pens and coloured her in using the pastels (and my blending sticks/tortillons made things SOOOO much easier than life was before I bought them), and I added a few details with a white gelly roll pen. She has little spots that are an approximate representation, in spirit, of the prominent "beauty marks" that exist on my own body. So the original art was created entirely traditionally on paper, but then I cleaned, compiled, and tweaked the images on the computer using Gimp.

Once in England, I was assigned to Trinity College. While studying there, I was gifted the official Trinity scarf, which I retrieved from my closet a few days ago to create the scarf my dragon here is wearing. The emblem on her scarf is literally copied straight from a photo I took of my own scarf, which I then essentially digitally superimposed onto my illustration using Gimp. (If you zoom in or click to "full view", you'll be able to see the detail of the Trinity coat of arms on the scarf.) Before that, however, I also used Gimp to clean up the edges of my dragon illustration so that I could place her as a digital "layer" over my Radcliffe Camera illustration, which serves as the "background." I re-sized and cropped as necessary to get the right composition, and then I added a digital blur to the background layer, thus setting it apart from my more crisply-lined foreground dragon. Finally, I added a little shadow on the grass beneath where the dragon stands.

That was all probably way more than any of you actually ever wanted or needed to know, but hopefully I've been, if nothing else, thorough and accurate in my explanation of my process.

Soli Deo Gloria!

The group hosting the contest:

The contest info: fav.me/d94yh6y

The entries thus far: dragon-fanatics.deviantart.com…

Description

UPDATE: Voting has concluded. Tying for 4th place, I received an "honorable mention." Thanks so much to all who voted for me!

~~~

UPDATE: Voting to determine the winners of the "Summer's End" contest ( fav.me/d94yh6y ) hosted by Dragon-Fanatics has officially begun, and I need your help! I am asking all my lovely loyal fans, all my wonderful watchers, and all my fantastic friends, please, please vote for my entry! Or if you have added this piece to your "favourites," please consider voting for this piece in the contest as well. I would be very grateful!

Please VOTE ON THIS POLL: --> dragon-fanatics.deviantart.com…

Please vote for me by Tuesday, October 20th, 2015. Thank you so, so very much, to each and every one of you!

~~~

This is my entry for the contest at Dragon-Fanatics . The theme is "summer's end," and the objective is to answer the question, "How would a dragon (or your own character) celebrate the end of Summer?" So in answer to the question, here's my train of thought:

When I think of the end of summer, the obvious annual event that comes to mind is "back to school." (Ugh, right?) But for almost every year of my young life, such a thought was the polar opposite of anything celebratory… except for the very final portion of my formal education, when I had the privilege of spending the Michaelmas (Autumn) term studying abroad at the University of Oxford in England. So I thought I'd make a little dragon character that sort of represents me, in a sense, my "fursona," if you will. So here she is, reading a thick old book, wearing her official Trinity College scarf, and posing in front of the iconic Radcliffe Camera, truly eager about the start of her college term.

To create this piece, I used my own photos that I (and my husband) took (with our own cameras) of the Radcliffe Camera as a reference for illustrating the background. As you may have seen/heard/read my complaining before, I hate drawing backgrounds/buildings and I know they're not my strong suit, but I gave my drawing of this building the best I could give it—exclusively done with soft chalk pastels. On a separate sheet of paper, I drew the dragon using my ink brush pens and coloured her in using the pastels (and my blending sticks/tortillons made things SOOOO much easier than life was before I bought them), and I added a few details with a white gelly roll pen. She has little spots that are an approximate representation, in spirit, of the prominent "beauty marks" that exist on my own body. So the original art was created entirely traditionally on paper, but then I cleaned, compiled, and tweaked the images on the computer using Gimp.

Once in England, I was assigned to Trinity College. While studying there, I was gifted the official Trinity scarf, which I retrieved from my closet a few days ago to create the scarf my dragon here is wearing. The emblem on her scarf is literally copied straight from a photo I took of my own scarf, which I then essentially digitally superimposed onto my illustration using Gimp. (If you zoom in or click to "full view", you'll be able to see the detail of the Trinity coat of arms on the scarf.) Before that, however, I also used Gimp to clean up the edges of my dragon illustration so that I could place her as a digital "layer" over my Radcliffe Camera illustration, which serves as the "background." I re-sized and cropped as necessary to get the right composition, and then I added a digital blur to the background layer, thus setting it apart from my more crisply-lined foreground dragon. Finally, I added a little shadow on the grass beneath where the dragon stands.

That was all probably way more than any of you actually ever wanted or needed to know, but hopefully I've been, if nothing else, thorough and accurate in my explanation of my process.

Soli Deo Gloria!

The group hosting the contest:

The contest info: fav.me/d94yh6y

The entries thus far: dragon-fanatics.deviantart.com…