Behind the Scenes: Nurse Dragon Concept Process (Patreon)

It's time for another behind the scenes peek at how the dragons are made. This time, let's have a look at how the Nurse Dragon's original concept was created.

First, we knew we wanted Helga to be a herbivore, so we looked for a real life example of herbivorous reptiles. We decided that iguanas would be a good reference for the mouth and teeth. We also had to decide how she would care for the eggs that all require different bile to incubate. Inspired by crocodiles, we thought a neck pouch would be a great idea. Since she was going to be a "tank" like creature, we wanted her to have a strong body as well.The first render of the design gave us a quilled and double-horned Nurse. But it wasn't quite right. The quills were too delicate for this big gal, so we thickened them into spikes instead.Now that the back was looking better, we turned to the skin and face. Something just wasn't working with the double-horns, so we removed the top one and added a triceratops inspired crown. We also wanted to make sure she could fly, so we increased her wing size and changed the shape of them slightly. This was also the stage we gave her larger, more deadly tail spikes.The final tweaks were rounding out her back spines, slight adjustments to her horn to avoid clipping issues and fixes to her wings and feet. The end result is the powerful and beautiful Nurse dragon that you see in the concept artwork today.