Dragon anatomy

These are the original Dragon anatomy tables as stolen all over the Internet.

It was 1997, and I painted them for Jennifer Walker, who then ran draconian.com - the biggest and most authoritative dragon-themed site on the Internet. (The latter had been admittedly smaller then.)

At first they had been popping up on other web sites, without any credit or links back to me or Jen. Soon there were too many to argue with. Then they began popping up in print.

To date, I had been shown these tables used in image collections, book covers (usually altered or plagiarized), magazine illustrations (the worst offender was Italian "Macchina del Tiempo" which printed a whole spread illustration composited out of all three), and as a crowning achievement, a movie. No credit was ever given.

The movie in which these make an appearance is "Dragon Fighter", and they can clearly be seen pinned to a wall in the mad scientist’s lair. No alteration; presumably the mad scientist downloaded them from the Internet like everyone else.

In all cases the people who did this had claimed they didn’t know these were mine, and usually blamed someone else, like a graphic designer. I can understand that many people treat the Internet as a massive clip-art dump, but it takes just one Google search for my name to find me, and it is written clearly on each table. It wouldn’t kill them to give me a line of credit or ask nicely. Nope, no one did. They just removed the copyright message from the images and used them.

I’d certainly expect more class than that from a publisher or a cinema studio.

Anyway, here is my inadvertent contribution to the memetic clutter of the humanity.

If you want to use those, you’ll have to ask Jen Walker (dragoncharm at draconian.com) or myself. Usually the permission is granted.