This painting has a longer background story.

First of all, it's not my idea/composition. I used a (quite elaborate) sketch out of John Howe's book Forging Dragons.
John worked as a conceptual artist along with Alan Lee on the visual side of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
He has a website with a forum, and to restrict the amount of fan art images that were posted, the Flavour of the Month was created. It's a monthly contest more or less, and at the end of every month 5 paintings get voted to stay in the online portfolio permanently.

So, as January is "Dragon" month, I bought Forging Dragons (I'm very bad at inventing and painting dragons)and noticed how often John used a dragon sketch of which he said that he would like to do it in paint one day.
Given that he's quite busy with commissions anyway, I suggested to a few fellow forum members that we could do the colour versions of the dragon sketches and submit them to the Flavour.
I ended up painting the sketch on page 73 and I am very thankful that John's sketches are so elaborate, otherwise it wouldn't have turned out like this.

Ecolines/Watercolour/Watercolour pencils on
Montval Canson watercolour paper
300 g/m²
35,5 x 23,4 cm
Started: 9:53 am
Finished: 3:40 pm