Some Tips on Doing Dragons

Focus on Proportions and Shape Language over Anatomy

When I started doing dragons some time ago, I saw animal anatomy as a big part of them and found it pretty intimidating, but the more I worked on them the more I realized that it really isn't very much about anatomy, and the focus should instead be much more on the big proportions and shapes, such as here:

Thinking of the big ideas first and giving them primacy over anatomy, you will come up with much more interesting and out of the box designs, instead of just having different colored, different winged dog/cat creature with a slightly different head and horns.

Try to think of your creatures just as you would of characters, especially in terms of giving them different expressions, like this sly dude here.

What Passes as a Dragon

I also realized that anything with vaguely reptile-like features (like scales) and eventually some form of wings (unless the base dragon is more snake-like, then you don't even need those) will be recognized as a dragon. The focus should be on designing a fun and appealing creature with some features that would identify it as a sort of a dragon, instead of designing a dragon (unless you're really into classic dragons)

Reference

You can pretty much find all the reference you'll need for the wing structure and movement by looking at flying bats

And most of the reference you'd need for the body structure can be found by looking up big cats or dogs. The legs of classic dragons are pretty much cat legs with scales overtop. Here's an example of me using a very literal reference of a cat for a dragon:

You can keep the feline anatomical structure, but borrow proportions from different animals you'd like to associate your dragon with. For example, for an Ice dragon, I tried to use a more yak or bison-like body structure, while keeping the anatomy fairly cat-like:

For more feet references, you can look up those ugly hairless cats :D

Add some Narrative

It really doesn't take a lot more time to add some different posing, acting or other smaller elements that would point to a deeper narrative in the story. Narrative doesn't have to mean literally something happening or a story per se, but just some context and details to show a bit more of the world and the way the dragon might behave.

For example, the Ice dragon is wounded and has spears into him as if he is being hunted - this gives a lot of info - it can be killed, it's blood is red (and not something magical), it's a certain size compared to a human spear/arrow, spears and swords can pierce it's skin. Even the little white fading shows some snow and cold atmosphere.

You can see that I tried to do this in all of my dragons - the spider dragon has some webs flowing in the foreground and background (and it looked much more crappy before I added those), the swamp dragon has some herons for scale and attitude, the blood and fairy dragons both have some environment for context, while the fairy one also has a few other dragons to show they live in groups and some fireflies for implied scale. It's a great idea to always have some element, regardless on how small it is, the viewer picks up on it.

Look up Great Artists 

I love looking at Justin Gerard's (https://www.artstation.com/justingerardillustration) dragons for whimsical designs, character, attitude and shape design, and seeing Alexander Ostrowski's stuff (https://www.artstation.com/alexander-ostrowski) for more naturalistic, believable creature design. These 2 guys could also represent 2 different conceptual ends of the spectrum - one with very classic, fairy-tale dragons and the other with very nature-inspired dragons. When doing your dragons it's good to have an intention about where on that spectrum your design will be.