Over Christmas my wife and I took a trip to Taiwan to meet her grandmother. We had a fantastic trip that I’ll go into detail later with another post. When my wife and I travel we like to dive right into the culture by visiting the museums that are around. We decided to go to the National Palace Museum in Tai Pei. Its a magnificent building with several floors celebrating the Taiwanese and Chinese cultures. I am completely obsessed with Asian art. I loved every minute walking down the halls of each exhibit, and viewing the different artifacts collected from hundreds of years ago. One of those pieces was a stone tablet engraved with a dragon.

I couldn’t help but think to myself how cool this was, how old this was, and yet the technique is incredible. The lines work is breathetaking, and frankly I wish I had created it. Confusion time, and most importantly, I wanted to take it for myself and steal it. After all that is what great artists do, right Picasso? I believe he was the one that said “good artist borrow, great artist steal.” Either way, I do feel a bit like a poser for what is to come. So internet, don’t be too harsh on me. Be gentle.

What I did, was take the engraving and put it through my photoshop process. Here is what came of it:

This is the bottom section of the tablet. The line work in the hills give the piece its movement, rolling into the gold rock formations. If you give it a little creativity maybe the hills are leading up to structures like a kingdom or something underwater, perhaps the Lost City of Atlantis. Then we see this strange foilage coming out of the structures. The pink and blue lines that appear to be seaweed bursting out of the rock formations/city. It truly makes me wish I could ask the artist what they were thinking when they created the engraving.

Here is the piece, if I left it to only the line work. I wanted to add as much color as possible to make it as different as I could from the actual engraving. One thing that really popped out at me was the eyes of the dragon, as they looked so round and unlike any “modern” version of one.

I traced the lines from bottom to the top, and as I climbed up the tablet I noticed something that I thought was tree branches at first. However as I continued to go over the lines I realized that the dragon could be harnessing lightening or some sort of power. That is the “light blue” that is swarming around this threatening beast, and in his hand an orb controlling it.

Next in the process I wanted to fill everything in and make it solid here is how it turned out:

The clouds in this image really makes you feel like your stuck in some psychedelic storm and adds to the motion and chaos of the piece. Finally I took this and needed a background. I also wanted the dragon to pop more. I wanted the dragon to feel like it was really coming out of the image. Here is the finished product:

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