From Sketch to Watercolor: How We Created 'Rather Be With My Dragon'

Hey everyone!
We wanted to share with you the creation process of our latest artwork: a watercolor print featuring Rhaenyra and her dragon Syrax from House of the Dragon. If you're a fan of the show, you know that Rhaenyra has a deep bond with her dragon, and we really wanted to capture that in our artwork.

It all started with a rough sketch. We usually start in Photoshop with a pencil and sketch out the basic composition and details of the piece. For this one, we focused on the embrace between Rhaenyra and Syrax and the caption "Rather be with My Dragon" as a fun twist. We wanted to convey the love and affection between the two characters, and we felt like this pose and caption captured that perfectly. Then we added the heart to help frame both characters together.

Once we were happy with the sketch, it was time to tighten up the linework a bit and get some of the character details in.  We chose Rhaenyra’s costume from the episode when her Father announces her as his heir to the Iron Throne.  We felt like it was the most iconic and recognizable from Season 1.  Also took some time to research Syrax, taking cues from the book and the show.  At this point, we came up with the idea of turning the heart into an “Iron Heart” to once again tie into the House of the Dragon themes.  Figuring out the swords was tedious, but we felt it would give this piece a nice touch.

Happy with what we had up to this point, the next phase was to go ahead and clean up all the line work.  We thought about keeping the lines a little sketchy, but decided against it for this piece.

Once the line work was complete, we were finally able to move on to the digital watercolor phase. We love using watercolor brushes in photoshop because they have a soft and dreamy quality that we think works really well with fantasy and whimsical subjects like dragons. We started by laying down the base colors and gradually building up the layers and details. This is our favorite part of the process because we get to see the artwork come to life and start to look like a finished piece

After the watercolor phase was complete, it was time to add the final touches and details, like the outline around the characters, a light wash for the background and finally the caption.

And that's it! From rough sketch to final digital watercolor painting, it was a fun and enjoyable process to create this artwork. We hope you guys love it as much as we do, and that it brings a little bit of whimsy and magic to your space.