Hello aeronauts, welcome once again to these crazy strokes I call art. Continuing with the commissions made for @smanuels, I am pleased to present you a well known flying machine but in a new more aggressive and destructive version.

I have been commissioned by @smanuels to illustrate a helicopter, but not just any helicopter, no, this is a Dracopter a combination between a helicopter and a dragon, but all mechanical, when @smanuels told me the idea I thought it was a machine with organic dragon parts, which would have been very cool and scary, but no, what was wanted was a war helicopter with dragon look on the front end and painted eyes on the windows.

Get ready for war, tighten your belt and take a look at the step by step of this illustration.

Tools:

Wacom Intuos 4
Photoshop
Brushes courtesy of Imad Awan: Download here

-Step 1:

I had to look for references of real helicopters, since in my head I had the typical image of the helicopter drawn by children and I was far from the stylized look I wanted to achieve. Shaping the dragon's head was a challenge, no matter how I sketched it, I couldn't find a good structure that would make you think at first sight that you were looking at a dragon.

-Step 2:

Using greys, I quickly constructed the landscape in a layer separated from the shape of the helicopter, then the coloring came with the help of the "overlay" fusion mode, from there I continued painting in a normal layer with the airbrush.

-Step 3:

The color of the helicopter was supposed to be silver, but since this kind of metallic color is usually reflective I had to take the colors of the environment and add it to the aircraft casing, resulting in a little blue from the sky, desaturated green from the ground, strong grays from the smoke and of course a little light gray from the metal itself.

-Step 4:

TFrom the beginning of the illustration, one of my fears was to make the propellers in motion, as it is a bit complicated due to the perspective, but I managed to use motion blur and a soft draft to eliminate the exaggerated blur in some areas.

On the other hand, the dragon's mouth looked pretty boring, so I proposed the client to add a machine gun in the middle of the mouth and he loved the idea. Therefore, I used the loop tool to select the area of the jaw and then used the "transform" tool to open the mouth and fit the gun inside, making the Dracoptero look more mortifying and making it spit bullets everywhere.

Tell me in the comments that you imagine when you see this illustration.

I'll leave you a little gif with the whole process in it, so you can better appreciate the step by step.

Don't forget to check out my gallery at NFT Showroom, where you can acquire some of my art and collect it, encouraging me to create new and amazing artworks.