I had to use my digital camera to capture this, which definitely isn't showing it off to best effect. After the competition closes I'll be updating with a better digitization. Sorry about that - please try to see through to the actual painting, which is bright and crisp and full of colour.

I need to credit and thank a couple of stock artists whose photographs I used to help draw the figure and the dragon:
The girl herself: [link] by ~lisolette-stock
The dragon, loosely: [link] by ~markopolio-stock
Thanks for those nifty resources.

I painted this in Windsor and Newton watercolours with a size 4 and a size 0 brush (plus a big brush I got in China <3 for the washes) on Arches hot press (never used it before, it’s lurrrvely), and used surgical spirit (rubbing alcohol) in the background. Many, many, many hours, not at all helped by a stinking cold and a festival over the weekend. Wish I had spotted this contest before the end of last week.


Here Follows a Long and Probably Skip-able Breakdown of the Concept.

I had a lot of fun coming up with the idea for this. The contest theme was to somehow mix fantasy and sci-fi innovatively. So I thought a bit about what I liked best about each. And now I'm about to launch into an unnecessarily lengthy explanation...

The kind of fantasy novels I read when I was growing up and loved more than anything else at the time was about people using magic to connect to the world around them, and especially to magical beasts... the best of which are clearly dragons My introduction to that kind of stuff was Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth, which I've since gone right off, but in middle school was completely obsessed with. I also read a fair amount of Anne Mccaffrey. Then I got really into Robin Hobb. I still have the Fool books on my bookshelf behind my bed and they're still vivid in my mind. Finally, I recently saw and loved How to Train Your Dragon, so that might have biased me a little too!
Another fantasy theme I was thinking about was the kinds of mythic themes that play out in lots of that fantasy - good and evil, entrapment, regeneration, suffering and deliverance. All those fun things. So I definitely wanted an air of twisted fairy tale about it. Particularly thinking of sleeping beauty. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has written some interesting stuff about myths. I remember reading about how they often deal with liminal situations, and the borderlines between things. I was really keen to get some of that in there: guarding/threatening, symbiosis/parasicism, life/death, nature/machine, flesh/magic, earth/sky, and then just things as simple as solidity/transparancy, red/green, hot living things/cold crystal formations. I like opposites put together in images, and especially when they combine to make a kind of complicated unity.

As for sci-fi, I've never really been into stuff about robots shooting each other or epic space battles or star trek and all that. My first sci-fi phase was Animorphs - so again with wanting to focus on how cool it is that these genres let you imagine you could connect with nature. After that, I read the classic dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. And now I absolutely love cyberpunk dystopias - Gibson's Neuromancer, and Bladerunner. I wanted some of their ambiguous or downright pessimistic viewpoint to come across as well, kind of tying into the myth theme I was trying to explain just before. Grimy urban dereliction, the ambiguity of the ghost in the machine (Ghost in the Shell <3). Thoughts about mortality, consciousness, morality, nature and technology, permanence and destruction.

And from an artist's and technical point of view, I wanted to try and do something more 'design' orientated than normal. I've been thinking about trying out tattoo designing, so that was in mind. Also, I had this ace trip to London a few weeks ago and gorged on art galleries. One of the thoughts I came away with was I love the very particular, patient way the late medieval/early renaissance artists handled details like plants and hair, and then in the Tate Britain I had the same thought about the Pre-Raphaelites, who were reviving that focus on carefully rendered detail, just before the Impressionists were about the take a completely different track.

So this is (state the obvious) what I came up with. Hopefully you’ll be able to make out that the wings are mechanical, and that the girl sleeps inside a mechanical/organic egg/thing. Is the dragon guarding, or menacing? Is it an egg – if so, symbiotic or parasitic? Is there a linked consciousness between them? What role does the tree play? Is the girl sustaining the tree or the tree sustaining her? Did the technology come before the magical creature who has since reclaimed it, or was the dragon a part of the design. Is it a castle to defend yourself within, or a prison?
I half want to explain all the details and symbols as they were intended (please look! There are lots of them and I took an age putting them all in there), but that would kind of defeat the point of visual communication. I prefer just to ask all those questions

But alllllll that aside, I hope it is good to look at, whatever you take it to mean, and I hope that it is a thought-provoking take on the contest theme.