Process Photos: A Chinese Fairytale

I've been reading Amy Tan's novels this summer, and so I was inspired to do a Chinese related piece. Because my last piece, Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf, was really static, I wanted to explore motion in this piece. I've honestly never had so much difficulty deciding a color palette. In the end, I googled some Chinese paintings and found a common color thread among them. I decided to use a very similar palette in comparison with those paintings. I'll post a nicely scanned version of this sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.

Finished line art of the piece. I sat and stared at this for a very long time before I decided on what colors I was going to use.

Working on the skin tone.

Finished the hair and starting the outfit. 

Outfit finished. At this point, my mom really thought the little girl resembled a boy. I still agree with her to some extent. Oh, well!

I had no idea what color to choose for the dragon. I played around with some ideas in my head, but ultimately decided to use a pink/red mixed with tons of green and blue. This was extremely experimental. I've never drawn a dragon before. 

Started with an idea for the scales. 

Went over them with colored pencil to see if my effect would work. At first I hated it, but my sister saw it and absolutely adored it. It's thanks to her that I continued with my scale effect.

And I'm really happy I continued with it. The scales add a lot of necessary texture to the piece. Yay for the principles and elements of design!

Again, I had no idea what color to use for the dragon's hair. I wanted something dark, but I didn't want to use  a blue that would blend in with her outfit.

I'm happy I made that color decision. 

Final touches to the dragon...

I wanted the background to be really organic and soft. I'm happy I decided to leave it very basic without many distinctions except for the fact that the background is obviously some sort of Chinese mountain-like landscape.

The trees in my last picture didn't recede into the background as well as I had hoped. I wanted that effect with this background, so I made sure to blue and gray out the mountains farther back.

Closest thing to the finished piece until I scan it. The colors are really off, but it's better than nothing. I'm really proud of the finished product. I can't wait to share it. :)