Pocket Dragon

Mithrandir the Grey heaved a sigh as he stuffed his pipe, such as to shrug off the day's worries. They had done a lot of worrying at the White Council, and discussing and thinking and planning and... well, counceling, you know. Now was the time to have some weed and do a lot of relaxing with his fellow wizards, staring at the fireplace in sheer fascination of this natural phenomenon. Finished at last with pipe-stuffing, he flicked his fingers at the weed, anticipating the sweet smell of its smoke.

Not a single spark.

He tried again, to no avail, but much to the amusement of Curunir the White, who was presently fiddling with a small silvery box. "Getting old, brother, eh? You should take a vacation." He mused a while, with Gandarf muttering something about "tired" and "long day", then started to chuckle. "Man, dig this: The Servant of the Secret Fire, Wielder of the Flame of Anor, burned out! - Ah, just kiddin', old man! I've been getting the fizzles so frequently the last centuries, I've given up on it; couldn't live without this anymore - here, try!" He tossed the small silvery box over. "An orcish invention. I tell you, our enemy's minions may be cruel, but they sure aren't dumb."

With deep suspicion, Mithrandir eyed the container, but when he could not make out any signs of devilry on the outside, he flicked it open at last. And started.

"But... but that's...!"

"A pocket dragon, yes." Curunir grinned a broad grin.

Modern depictions of dragons tend to be larger than their original representations, which were often smaller than humans, but grew in the myths and tales of man over the years. (Wikipedia)

Pocket dragons are robust and easy to tend, living entirely on flammable liquid. Lamp oil is recommended, but strong alcoholic beverages such as brandy will do as well. They are stubborn however and hard to train, so cages often come with integrated miniature torturing devices to provoke the desired aggressive behavior, despite all animal rights activists' efforts to have this practice banned.

Lighter based on a free model, polished up in Wings3D; DAZ Millenium SubDragon (LE) posed in Poser; scene exported to POV-Ray format using PoseRay; texture definitions modified and fire effect added manually in POV-Ray; texture and output files gamma-corrected usng HDRShop and IC, respectively; signature added and image converted to JPG using Photoshop.

The fire is a purely procedural media effect. Main illumination of the scene is radiosity (using surprisingly low quality settings) from the fire, aided by a moderately dim classic area light, and some very subtle image-based illumination which also serves to add reflection to the lighter. Strong focal blur was used to add depth and a sense of small scale. The lighter uses a single-pass micronormals approach (taking advantage of the focal blur for jitter and oversampling) for blurred reflections.

Virtually drowning most parts of the image in shadows is fully intentional in this case, to somewhat obscure the lighter and give a strong contrast between light & shadow.