Year of the Dragon

Speedrunning my annual Lunar New Year illustration

For a couple years now I’ve been making a personal piece in celebration of Lunar New Year. It’s become a tradition for myself and also an opportunity to allow myself to play, try new things and imagine stories beyond what I’m able to do in my client work.

Here’s a look back at the past four years of Lunar New Year illustrations. You can definitely see the slow transition from more decorative illustrations into “I’m just gonna take this as an opportunity to capture a moment in a fantastical world that happens to feature a zodiac animal”.

I usually start the process about a month out, but life and the world this year have been ~a lot~ so I ended up with only a couple days to dream up a Year of the Dragon piece!

I started by brainstorming for ideas, putting in as little effort as I could before landing on a vague concept I could run with (art directors I promise I’m not like this with client work). I wanted to do something a bit out of my comfort zone while leaning into creating a fantasy world. Let’s be honest, the dragon is the most intimidating zodiac animal to draw so this was already feeling overwhelming!

Please enjoy my brain vomit and speed scribbles

The vague storyline I had in mind was a person offering a pearl to a Wood Dragon, framed by a portal inspired by Chinese wooden screen panels. I wanted to stylize the Wood Dragon by pulling references from pine trees and pinecones for details through its head and body so I gathered a bunch of reference photos to look at as I worked.

With all this prep done I was ready to dive in! Sketching and working out linework for a piece are definitely the most time-consuming and painful parts of my process. Because I was rushing through this, I worked off of a super rough thumbnail, and did a lot of the thinking while laying out flats and linework so the jump between stages here is pretty extreme.

After laying out the flats I ended up ditching the extra wood panels because I felt like the amount of detail and layering was too much. Keeping it to the one circular portal panel drew the focus back to the main action without being too distracting.

I sped up the coloring process once I had the full piece done in black and white by using a super helpful gradient map technique that I learned from Jojo Lee (they show you how to do it in Procreate, but you can do the same thing in Photoshop which is what I use). With a rough color pass done, I went back in using layer masks to add in pops of color.

The final color scheme I settled on somehow feels very vintage video game to me? It’s definitely outside of my comfort palettes, but I love how it ties it all together with a nod to lucky Lunar New Year colors.

Here’s the final piece, and you can see it with subtle animations added here.

Overall this took me about 11 hours over the course of two days and felt like running a marathon. I definitely achieved my goal of trying some new things and getting out of my comfort zone, but next year I promise I’ll be better with time management!!

I’m gonna go lie down now, Happy Lunar New Year everyone!