This fall I've joined in as a student in Joon Ahn's Fantasy Landscape painting course. And I got to paint Snake Mountain 🐍💀 There was an assigned lighting/mood/layer set-up that was baked in for the assignment, it was new for me so I tried to keep it simple for this first go around. Its a very simple and logical set-up for making a painting, but sometimes I feel like I have complicated ideas and I really wanted to just use direct reference and keep it simple and clean.
I used the skull from the Dracorex / Stygimoloch to reference for the silly demon face that was originally on the playset. My first instinct is to always go with the Euoplocephalus, definitely my favorite dinosaur, but even I had to admit the Dracorex was the right look for the demon-ish, horned shapes and the overall threatening expression.
Cool side note: Joon's final process is to blend a piece of an abstract/non objective painting on to the top of the layers to try to discover some interesting texture that you most likely couldn't just pull out of your head and paint. It's a smart idea, and I just so happen to have a folder of non objective paintings and explorations from this year so I get to recycle them into new works and it makes me happy :)