German Speartail

"The Dragoness", my new character, is taking shape. Here are some more infos about this beautiful girl...


Length: about 25 Meters (82 foot) from tailtip to nose
Weight: about 10 tons (22046 lbs)
Wingspan: about 35 (114 foot) meters
Age: Unknown
Secondary prey: Deer, cows, horses, sheep... all what can be subdued.
Primary prey: Humans, especially men


She's a "German Speartail", heavy armored with large, thick scales, especially on the throat, chest and belly, it's damn hard to kill her. The scales withstand all arrows up to large ballista-catapults and the large gray ventral-scales even rapid-fire of modern guns up to .50 BMG and single shots up to 20mm Vulcan.
The most vulnerable points are the eyes and the thinner finger-bones of the wings. Due her heavy and thick scales she avoid to fly over the sea or great lakes, because she can't swim.
Another disadvantage of her heavy armor is that she is not so maneuverable as smaller or lighter armored dragons in the air and a little bit cumbersome in a battle on the ground.

Hunting:
Mainly in night-raids on humans. Often she literally crashed with her whole mass into the center of villages, destroy houses with claws, teeth and especially the wiping tail, snaps fleeing people with claws and maw.
She loves men... on her raids on villages she prey mostly on boys and young man. Seized victims will be often devoured whole and alive, this took less than a minute and she is ready to hunt down her next victim. Commonly she eats about 5 to 7 humans during every raid on a village.

Defense behavior:
Beside claws, teeth and the muscular tail, she can spit fire as almost all other dragons too. Most dragons use a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to produce their flames. The German Speartail uses a petroleum-like substance that was collected in a special bladder-organ and was spitted through two glands in the palate, ignited there with a further chemical substance. It acts like Napalm: The burning incendiary composition stuck on the body of hit enemies and flows into foxholes, trenches and bunkers, and drainage and irrigation ditches and other improvised troop shelters. Even people in undamaged shelters can be killed by hyperthermia/heat stroke, radiant heat, dehydration, suffocation, smoke exposure, or carbon monoxide poisoning. A fire-spit can last 3 to 5 seconds and has an absolutely deadly range of about 50 meters and can causing extreme injuries and damages up to 200 meters (You see, she's not your average Skyrim-playmate )
The disadvantage to the more common hydrogen/oxygen-dragonfire is, that it can spit only 3 to 4 times until the reserve of the oily liquid is depleted. It took at least one day for the glands to reproduce enough of the substance again for further 3 to 4 spits.

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The "update" to [link] and my second serious handrawn work after more than 25 years... Painting this damn beast cost me a week of my life, but slowly i learn it.
Done in MyPaint (80%) and PSP X (20%, post-production) using a Wacom Bamboo Fun.
References used: Tips, tricks, tutorials from the book "DragonArt" (german edition is titled "Drachen zeichnen") by *neondragon Thanks!


Nope, and no "cool" holes in the wing-membranes. I think, intact wings are most important for dragons/wyverns and tears and holes in the wings will be heal in a short time. Until it is not a dragon in, or shortly after a hard battle, the often depicted holes in the wing-membranes are IMHO silly.

And sorry for the extreme download-size (over 38 Megapixel). MyPaint didn't work with preadjusted image-sizes in widh and height in pixel and so it got bigger and bigger and bigger during working on it... but i did not wanted to sample it down too... Big dragoness, big picture!

Update Jan. 25, 2012: I changed the colors of the horns and claws to a darker tone, it looks IMHO better.