DRAGON KNIFE - Conceptual Designs For THE MINT In The Late 90's

Here are a bunch of conceptual designs I did for a Dragon Knife for The Franklin Mint in late '98. This was before the computer age of digital coloring had taken off so I used markers, pastels, colored pencils and whatever else I had around at the time. Photoshop and any kind of digital art was only used by a very small handful of artists in The Mint at that time. I went digital in 2000 in terms of doing art. From these drawings (if and when they got approved) they then went into the next phase of development, which was making an actual full-size prototype. Most of these were sketched on tracing paper or vellum since they made a lot of changes and it was easier to fix on those two papers. From that point, I'd make a copy of each drawing and then color each knife in a variety of colors and schemes with different gems and metals depending upon what the art directors wanted. Some of the designs were just left in the sketch phase and some got fully produced. Enjoy!