The Reluctant Dragon

The Reluctant Dragon is one of my favorite Disney shorts. The basic premise is that there is a dragon discovered by the villagers of a town. Fearful of the dragon they bring in a dragon slayer. The Dragon however is not ferocious, and prefers to write poetry. At any rate, it’s a delightful short cartoon with very whimsical characters. I’ve always cared for the dragon’s care-free spirit, so I decided to immortalize one of his many signature poses.

Dragon_small

This was mostly done in Photoshop. The basic outlines were done in Illustrator, then brought into Photoshop where I tried to shade it all. It’s not perfect, but the likeness is certainly there.

2013 Mac Pro

I’m still out on whether-or-not I am enthusiastic about the direction Apple is taking with the Mac Pro. The benchmarks that have started popping up reveal that it is a blazingly-fast machine, but for some reason I find that I am on-the-fence about it (so far). Perhaps its the fact that there are fewer user-upgradeable parts than I am used to having, which makes me weary of relying on it for more than a few years (My present Mac Pro has lasted 5 years, and has had numerous upgrades, including processors). Perhaps its the lack of PCIe slots, or internal expandability. Yes, I could spend lots of money to buy a thunderbolt accessories, such as a PCIe adapter, however, these accessories (presently) are limited in selection, fairly expensive, and limited to the speed of Thunderbolt 2 (which is PCIe 4x equivalent).

At any rate, I digress. I’m not here to review, critique, or speculate about the new product, but to do what I always do… Vectorize it.Mac Pro 2013

Apple products keep getting easier, and easier to draw. The continued effort to create minimal, easy-to-use products drives the design to be more featureless, which in turn means there are fewer details to replicate! The newly unveiled Mac Pro is no exception. With no visible buttons, lights, or ports (on the front), it is positively simple to replicate with just a few shapes and gradients. The most time consuming part were the ventilation holes at the bottoms of the machine. As always, this was done in Illustrator.

© 2007-2015 Michael Caldwell