Dragon Day

Dragon Appreciation Day, or just Dragon Day, is a popular holiday all over Antellonia. It started as a joke between two wizards, neither or whom had ever seen a dragon. One said that dragons had been long extinct and you never see them around nowadays. The other said that dragons were very much not extinct, and that you could still find them if you just knew where to look. To this the first one said that just because a cat has wings or a jumble of rocks looked like a giant spiky head, didn't mean dragons were real. He joked that if dragons were real, they would come out and let the world see them — or were they simply afraid?

Now, this conversation, as the story goes, was overheard by a lizard, who told it to a raven, who told it to a cat, who in utter indignation (for cats are closely related to dragons) went and told the old earth dragon up in the mountains. And it is said that the very next day (which happened to be June 15th) the two wizards strolled outside to find their yard surrounded by every sort of dragon you could ever imagine. And ever since then June 15th has been celebrated as the day dragons stop hiding in the background and come out to play — and most of them do.

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This piece is rather full of dragons even by my standards; there are nine, and only two are in disguise. Also the little girl running down to the beach is a sort of junior self-protrait: as a kid I always wanted to have a real dragon friend, and be able to step into pictures. I'm not sure how much this influenced my passion for drawing, but I'm sure it had something to do with it.

As for Dragon Day, that is a holiday I made up myself. Every year on June 15th I make a drawing celebrating dragons in all their scaley goodness. This piece was done for Dragon Day 2006.

Prismacolor pencils on 9"x12" drawing paper. Art and related prose are © myself. Antellonia is my own original fantasyland, where pretty much all my original fantasy work is set.

Have you hugged your dragon today?