Year of Dragon 2024: Illustration in Procreate

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate by Larissa Yeung Fung

Chinese New Year in 2024 is coming up. It’s the Year of Dragon. There are many stories about this legendary creature in Chinese culture. I’ve heard a few when I was a kid. I can’t remember them exactly, but they all left me with the impression that Chinese dragons are powerful and they bring prosperity to people.

I decided to draw a Chinese dragon in paper-cutting style. I remember growing up seeing all those paper-cutting pieces during Chinese New Year, conveying people’s wishes to each other. And it inspired me to create this illustration.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | the challenge

Sketch Preparation

I drew a sketch in Procreate beforehand by planning all the cutouts on the dragon's body to mimic the paper-cutting effect. I also drew a border around it, which is inspired by Chinese border designs.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | sketch

Drawing the Silhouette

I drew the whole shape of the dragon, and then colored it all in. I used a textured brush to do this illustration. I didn’t use the color drop function in Procreate to color my work, because I wanted to preserve the textured effect of the brush. So I just colored the dragon bit by bit, just like doing coloring in on a piece of paper.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | Drawing the silhouette

Creating Cutouts

To create the cutouts, I used the eraser in Procreate to remove the parts I don’t need. I set the brush to be the eraser while completing this step, so that I could create the same textured effect on the cutouts.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | Creating cutouts

Coloring Cutouts

I created a new layer underneath the dragon to color in the cutouts. To me, this is the most enjoyable part of the work to see lots of colors appearing on my dragon.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | Coloring cutouts

Coloring Border

At the end, I drew the border with a dark color to highlight my colorful dragon. And the entire illustration is now complete. I’ve spent quite a few days on this project, because the Chinese dragon is not that easy to draw. But I’m glad I pulled it off and ended up with a beautiful work.

Year of Dragon: Illustration in Procreate tutorial | Coloring border

You can download the color palette I used in this work:

I created a Year of Rabbit illustration last year in a similar style. You can read about it in this blog post here.

Enjoy the tutorial and hope you can also draw your own dragon.

Happy creating!