Peter Pracownik's art / the old JPEG that was floating around the '00s web

The Moon Dragon, otherwise known as Moony, is the oldest dragon mascot that I have. She was created some time around early or mid 2005, based on a painting I had done in a summer art workshop in 2004. The painting itself was a copy of what I have finally recently discovered was a white dragon painted by Peter Pracownik. The image was a common sight on the internet in the aughts if you were looking at anything to do with dragons or taking 'What color dragon are you' quizzes and the like. I printed out the tiny JPEG and took it to the class to see if I could paint it.

The copy I painted in 2004

In time, I found myself drawing the dragon from that copy painting multiple times. However, since the original details were muddied by first the JPEG and then my teen self's very amateurish copy of it, the design of the dragon changed to be something simpler. It kept the tail end, a bluish hue, the belly scales, and the tiered wing membranes, but lost the other details as it became the Moon Dragon. She soon came to represent me online, replacing a Saiyan OC as my avatar and handle. I gained the nickname "Moony" from my best friend, and eventually this became the dragon's unofficial name.

Like my current mascot Amaruuk is today, Moony became a guinea pig for trying new creative things. Pixel art, logo design, even 3D texturing in IMVU all had some of their earliest forays involve her. In my junior and senior years of high school, I took digital media/web design classes, and Moony took center stage for several projects (until her position as mascot was usurped by a three-tailed silver kitsune I used in 2007).

A simpler Moony from 2005

A logo from 2006 featuring Moony

Moony was really ground zero for a lot of what would become future tendencies - having a creature character to represent myself on the web, using said character in art and creative experiments, and (at least for the remainder of the '00s and into the early '10s), having a paired creature character to represent someone else. For Moony, this creature took the form of the Sun Dragon. I won't detail him here, that's for his own page.

Moony sprite from 2006

Like some of my other retired mascots, Moony was revisited from time to time over the years. It's always fun to flex a new art style or a higher level of skill on an old subject, so this occurs with some frequency. Being one of my oldest, Moony has been redrawn in many styles at quite a few stages of artistic development. She also had cameo appearances in projects from 2009 and 2010, and gained the alternate name "Lunaea" which has also been used on occasion (and was later repurposed for a moon goddess in another dragon's universe).

GALLERY

Stating the gallery with some Moony-related web graphics. The top 3 in the center I generated on sites back in Moony's heyday (the rest I made myself). I no longer remember where I got them, so if anyone recognizes these styles I'd love to link to them if they still exist!

These are the two surviving images of some of the earliest web layouts I ever tried to design in 2006 - though I never did get them or any other page from the era hosted.

This is the LCD digital pet styled Moony that was intended to be in one of the layouts. Fun fact, I also entertained a similar idea for my main Neocities layout before scrapping it in favor of having a dedicated pet section.

Here are some of the Moony-related adventures in texturing I did for IMVU in 2006-07 under the name DragonOfTheMoon. This is a practice that continued with my other mascot creatures.