Sea Caterpillar Dragon Thing (Contest Entry) by TheFantasyManatee on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Welp, I came up with something...interesting to say the least. I still can't decide if this design looks cool or stupid.

I'm leaning more towards stupid.

But I honestly don't really care, he's a funky little dude and I love him for it XD

This is my entry for OpalqeDragon 's design contest, where you design a dragon based on this really colorful caterpillar species: Saturniidae moth caterpillar. My first thought when looking at this caterpillar was how the 'thistles' on its back kind of reminded me of coral or seaweed and I thought that I could do a sea dragon with coral growing on its back. But while I was sketching, I thought that I should add more caterpillar elements, so I made its tail kind of look like a caterpillar. Though it could also be a lobster tail. I think that's the part of the design that I am iffy about. For the colors, I mostly just followed the colors that the caterpillar has. Though now that I think about it, the green patch on the back could be a secretion that the dragon makes to stick the coral to its body as camouflage. The secretion may also provide nutrients for the coral. And I would also imagine that fish and other sea creatures would be constantly swimming amongst the coral.

Anyway, I'm overall happy with this. And I'm also happy to add this guy to my growing collection of dragons. Though I still need to come up with a name.