Dragon with background

I have attempted a background, trying to get the balance right so it doesn't all merge together. but may try 

using pencil as well as just pen and try to get some grey tones in there. but i will photocopy and experiment. any feed back would be grand. for the next pieces i will include more characters interacting in a scene and see how that goes but this one is just the dragon and his castle.

This is it more detailed i may photocopy it and see what the trees look like black then the dragon

may stand out more. image is also slightly slanted because i had to take a photo, need an a3 scanner still looking at the moment. 

Initial ideas...

Initial ideas....

After researching into the story and the author i decided i wanted to go with making the characters more modern, putting them in more recogniseable clothes etc.

The Enchantress: disguised as homeless woman...


Beauty:

Pre-Beast:
Im still experimenting with characters, these are the best out of a bunch so far. Probably focus on the Beast for a while and other main characters... any feedback/advice would be appreciated :)

some inspiration

 Good to see a few sketches already posted up, I thought you could look at the following website, for a variety of visual styles, but especially in the way these illustrators sketch out ideas :)

http://twisted-genius.squarespace.com/

and especially:
http://twisted-genius.squarespace.com/journal/category/motivation-monday

Character drawing for Belle

Decided to go for the traditional feel towards the story, Keeping a 1700's look.
Now im going to try to arrange the character into scenarios aswell as working on the other characters.

Characters so far.

Not as much done as I'd hoped, found it hard to get into the project, but here's what I've got at the moment.

I've decided to go with having the Beast as a more humanoid animal rather than a mythical beast.

This drawing of the Prince was meant to be a starting point to give an idea of his appearance, I'm working on drawing more versions of him since this is quite flat but I won't be able to post them until I'm back in a week.

Haven't got many angles since I haven't got round to putting the characters more in situation, more colour will be added eventually. I've also got ideas for another few characters if they're needed in my development - but these four are my favourites to work on further at the minute.

Initial Beast Character drawings

Looking at using a dragon as the beast, working on some other drawings with the dragon illustrated in a scene with beauty and also more 3d looking drawings, these are the first drawings any advice would be appreciated.

Beauty and The Beast.

I've been reading the requirements for the entries, and I'm a bit stumped because it asks for two of the characters to be animals and one human, unless the fairytale has no animals in it - which depends on the version of Beauty and the Beast that's being retold as some of them don't have any important animal characters (apart from the Beast obviously).

Does anyone know which version we're illustrating? Or have any suggestions of how this can be solved?