Well everyone, it’s finally happened. For the first time on this site in like 5 years, I have drawn something that isn’t a dragon. You see, I plan to use my dragon drawings as the playable characters in a game I intend to make in the future, one that will be very story-driven and rich in lore and world building as well as high-octane battles against fearsome enemies. As for what those enemies would be, I though it would be smart to base them off of real-world animals that have some sort of connection to one of the ten elements of this fantasy world of mine. Some of these connections are pretty obvious, some are deeply symbolic, and others are a bit of a stretch but they still make some sense to me so for now I’m sticking to them. Pretty much all of these are just concepts right now though, so don’t be surprised if a few of these drastically change one day.

Now that all of that exposition is out of the way, we can talk about the artwork itself. I’ll be doing these in the same format was my original set of dragons for this project: going through each element one by one and drawing five creatures for each. So beginning with the Fire element, what better to base it off of than one of the most significant fire-related animals in the world, the Fire Salamander. Tons of fantasy settings already have their own versions of giant salamanders that both live in and look like lava, so this is my attempt at doing something similar and I think it turned out pretty well despite taking a lot of trial and error to get right. And while I haven’t thought too much about how these beasts will actually fight the player, I imagine these guys would attack with slow but strong melee hits in conjunction with spitting balls or streams of fire from a distance. I’m really proud of this lava lizard in terms of both the concept and the finished design, so I hope all of you like too and I’ll see you tomorrow for the next one!