Information NOT to be tl;dr'ed

Quick Stats
Full name: Gard Wyrmtail
Age: Physically, mid-twenties; Mentally, Nine
Height: 50ft
Species: Dragon
Personality: Simple-minded, docile, heavy-handed, naive, gullible, friendly, violent temper

Can spit magical fire-breath in a powerful stream or as potent, explosive fireballs.
Gard's scaly hide is magically resistant to effects of harmful physical and mental spells.
He is mildly resistant to physical harm, only strong bladed weapons can penetrate his scales, arrows and projectiles bounce off with only kinetic recoil damage.


History
Gard was once an ordinary dragon, in the sense that he was bestial acting upon instinct rather than thought. He had been taken at a very young age from his nest by a competent wizard who planned to use his magic and research to create an obeident labour force that could understand tasks given to them. With that, Gard had been exposed to a powerful spell that transformed him into a bipedal being capable of sentience and sapience, the ability to think of something other than survival and basic desire.

Gard however became startled and confused, unable to comprehend and understand the new feelings and thoughts in his head. The dragon panicked and destroyed the wizard's hideout out of fear and instinct, killing the wizard in the process by accident. He escaped the hideout and tried to figure out his predicament, eventually coming across simple tools and clothing that his new understanding mind could utilise them properly.

Several months pass and Gard matured quickly and almost grew twice his size since he transformed, he would be often be mistaken for a mutated giant or bizarre evolution of a common dragon. Quite a number of times he had stumbled into settlements with awful consequences of being attacked and chased away out of fear, having to learn by trial and error many times before sticking.

To those open enough to understand the giant, Gard has made a few short-term friendships in the months he spent in his sentience, learning that some people of the world are kind and caring enough to help and teach him things. His oft-forgotten goal is to find out the reason he was given his intelligence and sapience. While he would travel the lands for this knowledge and other things, he would never find the true answer to his sentience, having killed the only wizard who could've helped him by accident, his memories of the original incident suppressed for good.


Artist comments

Originally this had been a random 'off the top of my head' request to a wonderful artist called ~Shimmergloom, who was kind enough to allow me to request a picture to specification in only just a couple of days.

I would like to say now that the lineart was drawn by ~Shimmergloom, NOT ME. The colouring however IS is of my work, so you can feel free to critique my effort. If you want to see the original drawing, you check it out here. If you favourite or comment this, I appreciate it if you look at the original too!

I have been giving full rights to the character drawn and the image itself by ~Shimmergloom herself, gracefully promising to clarify the original artist for his creation by shoving a whole bunch of profile links in the deviation text. Heheh.

There are a few things I would've changed, Gard should really be plantigrade instead of digigrade, but of course I forgot to specify that on the request. I guess he'll be a sort of hybrid between the two, a larger heel that would moderately touch the ground while still leaning most of the weight onto the ball of the foot. But other than that, it's quite a close take on what I thought, even better actually. ~Shimmergloom did an awesome job.

I made the background matte the same colour as the deviation page, I got fed up of how devART's jpeg thumbnails royally screws up PNG transparency upon uploading, making it a horrible black background with white halos around it. At least since the background and page match, it's like pseudo transparency, huh? :>

Critique Preference

I'm not too bothered about critique this time around, all I ask is that if you want to constructively criticise my work, only critique my colouring ability, NOT the lineart. The lineart is not of my own creation as it was a request made by an another artist, you should go to the original deviation if you want to critique the structure yourself!







If you comment, PLEASE give some detail to why you find my artwork good or bad. I absolutely hate one-liner comments, if you like something, explain what about it you liked and why. It's not that hard, probably 2-3 sentences if you're being quick about it. I'm the kind of artist that prefers quality analysis over pointless praise, bear that in mind lest you tempt my 'hide comment' gallery tool...