The "Water Dragon" images seen below are natural images that were extracted from the outlines of various watersheds, including lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. My inspiration for these initially arose from viewing water shed patterns out of airplane windows, such as this photo taken while flying out of the New York City area:

As one can see, these photos, taken through the thick airplane window, never turned out very well, and so are not very useful. It eventually dawned on me though that these patterns can be readily obtained today from Google Maps and many other map sources. And after noticing that one of these resembled patterns resembled a dragon (see Water Dragon I below), the search was on!

I eventually identified many dragon like patterns, and even developed a mythology of sorts around them, similar to the way that human beings have read meaning into the natural patterns around them for countless millennia. You can read about this by clicking on each of the dragons below.

I present to you ten of my "Water Dragon" works in total below, the final presentation of which is the result of much experimentation in terms of formulation and media. These are printed on silk, or to be more accurate, a silk-satin blend. As such, they can be backlit, such as by being hung in a window, or lit from behind, in which case they GLOW spectacularly!

These images are very faithful to the original, natural outlines of the lakes and reservoirs which gave rise to them, the locations and names of which are also provided below. I have removed artificial looking human alterations to these patterns, such as bridges and large docks and similar. In the case of "Croco" (Water Dragon VI) I have also added shoreline in the lower right-hand section where there was originally an open bay. In "Hydron" I also included a few of the nearby waterways that feed into Hydron for effect.

A key aspect of watershed patterns which can be seen in these images are the meandering pathways of streams and rivers that arise from asymmetrical erosion of banks at turning points in the flow. This positive feedback renders straight streams nonlinearly unstable, and causes meanders to continually evolve and oscillate over the long term like slithering serpents.

Another important aspect of watershed patterns visible in these images are the fractal structures of many watersheds, that is, the fern-like self-similarity of watershed flow patterns on different scales, whereby the overall pattern seen on the large scale is also seen on the small scale. this aspect also arises from a positive feedback effect involving erosion - a larger flow erodes more, attracting additional flows to feed into it over time, leading to a coalescence of flows via a fractal branching structure.

These two aspects of watershed structure combine to immensely increase the length of shoreline per unit of water surface area, providing crucial habitat to myriad species.

Water is Life!

Water Dragon II