Welcome to the world, young one

Finally... after over a week of work, I finally managed to finish this. This sketch has been lying in my folder for a few months now, though only now did I get around to work on it properly. And no, not because I'm lazy or anything (though I have to admit, that I do sometimes suffer from that ), but because of the college work that I just HAD to get done ahead of everything. That's what you get for being a 1st year MA student...

Anywhere, if anyone of you has ever watched G1 MLP special "Rescue at Midnight Castle" (a.k.a "Firefly's Adventure"), you should be able to somewhat recognize these two. That's Scorpan and Spike.

Now I have a small backstory for this one: you see, as much as I like "Rescue at Midnight Castle", the one part that made me cringe slightly, among other things, was the one in which Scorpan changed back into this human prince guy (who basically looks like a mustachioed version of older Spike from G1 "Transformers" cartoon - I guess that shouldn't be surprising given that these two cartoons were being produced by the same studio and, probably sharing the same animation team). Even as a kid I thought it was pretty stupid!

So, in my slight re-telling of the story, Scorpan's still a prince... however he does not change back into a human. Instead he belongs to this race the-name-of-which-I-still-have-to-come-up-with, that lives alongside the dragons in this quasi-symbiotic relationship, where both races help each other out when the need arises. One example would be Scorpan’s people taking in orphaned/abandoned eggs/hatchlings and caring for them until they become self-reliant and independent young dragons. Hence Scorpan’s fondness of Spike: I imagine him as being some sort of a father figure/brother, based on their interaction in the original pilot. So here you have Scorpan with newly-hatched baby Spike.

Bear in mind, that at this moment I'm still getting it all planned and sorted out – some elements of what I’ve just written may or may not change, while some may remain the same. I really need to sit down at one point and spend some time planning this all out from beginning to end - maybe during this Christmas break I have enough time...?

As for the drawing itself – I used it mainly as a way of experimenting with different ways of coloring and shading. I mainly wanted to see if I can pull something different, rather than the traditional vector tool + paint bucket + airbrush + filters + other fancy stuff I used to utilize with my previous drawings . Also, bear in mind that this is basically a scanned sketch that’s painted in Photoshop – since my old tablet’s on its last legs, and using a mouse would be pretty much tedious I can’t make a proper lineart, sorry.

All in all I’m quite pleased with the final result, and I’m definitely looking forward to making some further experimentations.


characters(c) Hasbro
art (c) me