Preparing for the Illustration Master Class

I will be attending the Illustration Master Class this year. I've been looking forward to it since I heard about it, just after the first year it was held. So, over the next two or three weeks my posts will be about the class.

We were given our assignments a few weeks ago. We were able to chose from five topics, and I went with (surprise) a "dragon and 2-4 figures". Really though, the other topics just didn't fit for me. One was sci-fi, and I want to focus on fantasy, one was Conan related, which I'm not really into, and one was Dune. Dune is awesome, but I want to learn to paint trees well, so a background of dunes seemed like a cop-out, and I think I'll wait to tackle cityscapes. There was also an option for childrens' books, which was appealing, but there's a class at one of the local colleges that I want to take on that later. Doing a dragon with figures is going to be the best portfolio-building piece for me right now.

I began with some thumbnails:

I thought I would end up with something close to that last one (here's a closeup).

I was fond of the diagonals in this composition, and thought it would help give it some movement.

..with possibly a secondary drawing of something similar like these...

During my photoshoot, I didn't end up with quite the same poses as I'd planned on, but going though the images and picking poses I liked, I ended up with a thumbnail of a totally different possibility:

I decided I would just do two sketches (we're allowed), and with a bit of input fleshed out my ideas some more.

Aaaand, here are my current sketches:

Tomorrow morning, another photoshoot (with extra cool armor), and then I'll spend all my spare time outside of work between now and Wednesday finalizing my drawings. Thursday night I relax, and Friday I drive out. Thanks to everyone who's been helping me with ideas and dressup. The current consensus on recommendations now has been to put in more dragons.