MaggieJo Widdicombe wanted to see a Pachyrhinosaurus with porcupine quills, because she and Ashley Hall were talking about how bristles have been found preserved with ceratopsians like Psittacosaurus, so clearly this was the next logical step.

Ceratopsians with quills is a terrifying thought. Business in the front, business in the back. I'd rather run into a T. rex, frankly.

In all honesty, I've met a porcupine and they're actually quite friendly creatures. You can hand-feed them and it's really adorable to watch their little noses wiggle in excitement as they nibble on cucumber sticks. Just don't make them feel threatened (just like any other animal).

Also, this pachy is P. canadensis, and at this point I've now drawn each of the three species of Pachycephalosaurus. Do I get a medal or something for that?

 What, you thought he meant challenged to a Pokemon battle?

... Nah, clearly they want a Yu-Gi-Oh! duel.

I tried so hard to get into Yu-Gi-Oh! when it first came out in the US. But the card game was overcomplicated, the anime was boring, and the only other person I had to talk to about it was the 13-year-old boy down the street. I'll just stick with Pokémon and Digimon.

 MaggieJo Widdicombe keeps coming up with fantastic paleoart ideas at Virtual Fossil Friday! Last week she said she wanted to see a Yutyrannus in a Christmas sweater, and I just had to draw that.

Hope everybody has a very happy and safe holiday season!

More sketches!

I've always loved the idea of centaurs that are other things besides half-horse.* So here's an epic jaguar-woman warrior.

Miscellaneous character designs; I was looking through a very old sketchbook of mine (from junior high) and decided to redraw a few of my archaic character designs.

That girl on the top totally looks like a Mega Man fan character**, and although back then I was really bad at adding any sort of context to my drawings, I have vague memories of seeing ads for a new Mega Man game and thinking the character designs were interesting and wanting to draw my own.

 Couple of Hyren and Blynn doodles because they're so fun to write. Looking at my oldest sketchbooks, I'd forgotten just how long Blynn and Hyren have been around. I created Blynn and adopted Hyren (the real ones on the website) when I was 14 and drew some (badly rendered and not very funny) comics about them that were way too unpolished to get into the Neopian Times. Back then, Hyren's character was drastically different than how he's portrayed in my Neopian Times stories--he was quiet and shy and bookish, and actually a lot like how Pharazon's personality turned out. Pharazon hadn't been created yet, though; in fact, Meridell hadn't even been discovered yet, and yes I am very old.

Back when I first adopted Hyren from the Pound, I toyed around with various sorts of mysterious and dramatic backstories for him. I think at one point he was a former pirate. I found a comic that shows him undergoing some sort of weird werewolf-like transformation under moonlight into a warrior Grundo very similar to Ghi Pharun. None of these ideas got very far. It wasn't until Worth Fighting For that I solidified Hyren's past and personality.

Blynn, on the other hand, has just always been Blynn. She came that way.

Her doodle is a reference to the on-site description for Flouds, which says to never feed them carrots but doesn't say why. Perhaps the reason is just too unspeakably horrific.

*This may have something to do with the fact that horses kinda scare me. I don't know why, but I get along a lot better with carnivores than herbivores. Not sure what that says about me. I'm gonna go fangirl some theropods.

**This is not to be confused with the terrible Mega Man fan design I referenced in a post a few days ago. That one was totally different but arguably worse, because bad fan art by a junior high student is at least a little more endearing than bad fan art by a pimply, overly-emotional teenager.

... Maybe I'm a little too hard on myself.

 I got the idea for this one from my astro buddy Chris Lintott's excellent recent lecture "From Mars with Love", where he wrote postcards from several Mars missions. Most of them were very enthusiastic, but InSight was quite disgruntled at having been intentionally sent to the most boring place on the planet, and then its heat probe didn't even work. Can't win them all, I'm afraid.

 When this NPC says that about Team Rocket, it just makes me think that if Team Rocket doesn't have an adequate handle on what other people consider popular or useful Pokémon species, they're going to run into some issues.

Fun fact: I modeled the Rocket grunts in this one after my sister and brother-in-law. Little did I know that they would end up giving me a niece who would inspire even more video game comics!

 Another adorable anthropormophized spacecraft! The Venera landers have always been some of my favorite space missions. Let's engineer a machine that can survive long enough on the surface of of Venus to take and transmit pictures, because why not?

... So, when are we going back?