Smaug sketchies by SkarmorySilver on DeviantArt (original) (raw)
Oh hey itsa dagron 
This is the first of a whole bunch of concept arts I'll be doing for dragons on my new account, since I'm basically dedicating much of it to fantasy creatures in general and I figured I'd start with the most iconic fantasy beasts of them all. I sketched this way back in 2014 or so, shortly after the release of The Desolation of Smaug and the first eyeful everybody had of the titular dragon. I personally think that by itself the movie could stand to have considerably better pacing and much fewer twisting plot-threads - and as an adaptation of the middle part of the Hobbit book it is downright _ATROCIOUS_- but Smaug himself looked so damn glorious onscreen that the last few minutes were worth it in terms of visuals even if they royally botched the actual conversation (The dwarves barging in and ruining what was supposed to be Bilbo's shining moment? Said "shining moment" making Smaug sound like every other generic bad guy in modern media rather than the smug, vainglorious tyrant he is in the book?! WHY?!). One thing I'm still a little miffed about, though... is that they made Smaug a wyvern. Looking at the entire book they provided about designing the big lug - they really were that dedicated - I can understand why they went with that. I have to give them credit for trying the four-legged Smaug first, though I do wish they still went with that in the end because it's much more iconic and consistent with Tolkien's artwork. Still, wings as arms make slightly more biological sense, they allow him to gesture with much more grandeur, and if pterosaurs are any indication, this kind of system makes it easier to take off because he wouldn't have to develop giant leg muscles to leap into the sky like birds do, instead using the wings themselves for that. So wyvern!Smaug has his merits, and again, damn does he look pretty. 
Still, I wasn't quite satisfied with the arguments for wyvern!Smaug, because I personally still prefer Smaug as a quasi-hexapod (I say quasi- because my headcanon for dragon wings is that they aren't actually extra limbs, but dorsal sails modified by millions of years of evolution, originally evolved from extensions of those bony flanges on the vertebrae. Hey, it could happen!). So, how to compromise that with the wings essentially being his arms? An idle sketch I did one day provided an interesting compromise: the actual forelimbs have shrunken to the point of being vestigial like in some species of theropods. I'd compare them to T. rex arms but tyrannosaurs actually have powerful meathooks for arms, presumably for hanging onto struggling prey, so maybe Smaug could do the same if giant herbivores were a thing in Middle-Earth. Eh, tiny widdle armsies for Smaug it is, since the wings taking their place have probably rendered them evolutionarily obsolete anyway. Imagine if movie!Smaug had those things. Imagine his rising up from his treasure hoard to present himself to Bilbo were accompanied by him casually scratching himself with a vestigial foreclaw like the T. rex from the original King Kong or, more recently, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Imagine that hole in his armor being right under one of those arms, so that Bard's black arrow would literally end up going right into his armpit. Just... imagine.
This sketch study was basically me trying to put this idea into practice, and along the way I also put in some personal touches to try and make my own Smaug design a little more distinct. His body is a tad more serpentine, and instead of scales with jewels stuck in between like in the movie I reverted to the "waistcoat" of gold and jewels he has in the book, which unfortunately makes the weak spot a little hard to see, but it's there. Shoulda shaded it black to make it more visible, but oh well. Other things I threw in are membranous fin along the tail, like HTTYD's Night Fury, to give it some extra lift while flying and thus keep it from dragging him down like the tail of a kite; a hood with heat vents which he could flare before he blasts his fire breath, as an extra visual effect alongside the glowy chest in the movie; and three rows of jagged plates that light up like Godzilla at the same time. I know those little details may not be quite as iconic as what we got in the movie, lack of arms aside, but they sure as heck work for me. 
I may end up refining this design a little later down the road - if not for Smaug, then for a dragon character I'm planning for one of my original fiction projects whose appearance I now have a better idea of thanks to this little sketch collection. I mean, that design, man. I'm just so freaking fond of how it turned out.
Smaug and The Hobbit (c) J.R.R. Tolkien