I’ve had dragons running, flying and… burrowing(?) through my imagination for a long time now. I’d been thinking of creating a sort-of wyrm earth dragon like the one at the top of this post for at least five years, and had at least three false starts that I ended up abandoning. But now, I think I got it down.
Hmm, dragons.. I guess they represent some kind of mythical primal force to me. Forces of and embedded into nature, filtered through the human imagination. Or something like that? Seems cheesy to even write that out, ha!
I don’t care, I like dragons, and they are drawn to me 🐉
When I started drawing this, I knew I wanted my new dragon to be very serpentine, a sort of medieval Germanic / Asian dragon hybrid mix. It wasn’t until I was well into creating this artwork that I began thinking of my dragon as Níðhǫggr, a.k.a. Nidhogg, who was known to gnaw at the roots of the world tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology. Something about that feels right. Underworld dragon, earth dragon, The Great Wurm.
You can check out a YouTube timelapse video of my artwork's development and creation directly above.
