To overcompensate for missing three days of dragons this week, I found a wonderful professional artist to share with you today named Katie Croonenberghs, posting on deviantart as Kamakru.  Katie is actually drawing a dragon each day for an event called Smaugust.  This first one is her Day 4 picture.  I think it’s really amazing, especially the level of detail for a daily sketch!  I’m super, super jealous, not only of her talent, but of her commitment!

Katie is an amazing artist with an entire gallery of beautiful work, including another daily series from last year called Inktober.  Up next is her Day 10 sketch, and she even posted an eight minute (sped-up) YouTube video of herself drawing it that you should check it out too!

In the video, Katie talks about how doing a challenge like this is a great way for artists to get in the habit of drawing and practicing each day.  This, of course, gave me a little twinge of guilt since that’s exactly what I am trying to do with my daily posts and writing, but I’ve been failing so hard this week!  Ah well.

I loved finding Katie’s gallery, especially because a lot of her dragons are in a similar style to how the dragon in my novel, Finding Dragons, is supposed to look, especially this next one.  It helped to cheer me up quite a bit.

Finally, here is her Day 16 dragon — I absolutely love the wings, and even though I’ve been in love with the dragon wing concept I’ve had in my head for Marziel from Finding Dragons these oh so many years, this drawing made me sit up and take notice, and consider just how married to the idea I really am…

The only reason I didn’t lead with this, my favorite of Katie’s images so far, is because I knew the wing detail would be cropped out of the thumbnail on my main page and I couldn’t bring myself to do that.  But my goodness, this is beautiful, and I may have to see if Katie puts these sketches up for sale at all!

You can find the rest of Katie’s Smaugust gallery here, and she can be found all over the web not only at deviantart, but also her Official Website, on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, and you can purchase her lovely creations at Etsy, RedBubble, and Society6.  She has even more links on her deviantart profile page, so as you can see, there are many places to find her, and I highly recommend you do!

Thanks for reading, everyone!  Take care, stay creative, have a great weekend, and wish me luck going forward with my daily dragon committment!  Hopefully Katie has inspired me to do better — we’ll see!

Image credits:
Smaugust Day 4 by Katie Croonenberghs
Smaugust Day 10 by Katie Croonenberghs
Smaugust Day 16 by Katie Croonenberghs