Decided to make things harder on myself and convert everything I had done so far to vector instead of raster. I won't bore you with the details, but it's time consuming and required redrawing the whole thing over again. Added the castle to the background and some scales around the body of the dragon. Slowly but surely.
Worked on this piece for most of the day. I don't even want to know how many hours I have in it total. I've hand drawn everything on my phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra), then thrown it into the laptop and retraced every single line converting it to a vector image, manipulating curves and nodes (digital art mumbo jumbo). Also added the castle, scales (I kinda feel like it needs a few more scattered scales just to mix things up a little more), and a few flames.
If I were to guess, probably between 18 and 20 hours into it so far, but some of that I chalk up to learning curve as I'm still learning and getting used to making vector art. But I am enjoying it, and I'm learning a lot. I've been taking some online courses for it as well that have helped me learn quite a bit more over the past couple weeks.
When I talk to printers, I'm going to ask if there is any way to get the background orange close to the flame orange, but only make the flames blacklight sensitive. Hopefully they can get it close.
Finally done.... I think... I'll probably stare at it for a while and tweak things some more eventually, but I feel like it's done for the moment. Now to start talking to some printers.