I was fooling around on my tablet and ended up wondering what would have happened if I was the character designer for Sailor Moon. Planetary guardians wielding elemental powers and going through improbable amounts of drama for high schoolers should go into battle wearing something more functional.

 More sketching at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. I've sketched their Suskityrannus mount before, but I wanted to do a head shot.

I'm aware that a lot of this museum sketching is really samey, and I apologize, but I have a certain repertoire of portable media that I've been working with, and often I only have a half hour or so to spend at the museum, so more complex illustrations, or anything involving color, are usually out of the question. At any rate, these are definitely just practice doodles. Doodle paleoart is better than no paleoart, right? Hypothetically?

For clarification, Suskityrannus has only been found in New Mexico; however, there are fragments of a very similar tyrannosauroid found in the Wayan Formation of eastern Idaho, so the IMNH has a suski mount to show what the Wayan's critter probably resembled (although it is in all likelihood a different, new species).

Also just trying out dinosaurs with eyelashes. I'm sure at least some groups had them.

 

Popped on over to the Idaho Museum of Natural History and thought I'd change it up a bit and attempt a mammal! They have two great mounts of Smilodon fatalis, a.k.a. the saber-toothed precious pumpkin. 

I get really tired of paleoart that depicts felids as soulless killing machines and wanted to draw a Smilodon looking rather approachable. If my cat and I can be besties, why not? :) (If Smilodon was anything like modern cats, it would warm up to you real quick if it learned you were a source of free food and belly rubs.)

I don't draw prehistoric mammals as often as other animal groups, especially Pleistocene mammals, because they're not very far removed from modern fauna, so I get more worried about how closely I can get them to resemble their extant cousins, and we know perfectly well what those look like. With stuff like dinosaurs or Cambrian stem-arthropods, I feel like I have a bit more wiggle room. 

I think that's part of why I find paleoart so fun, because there's actually a good deal of creature design involved; rather than drafting illustrations of something you can get photographic (or in-person) reference for, with paleoart you're given a skeleton or a carapace and you get to use your (scientifically-informed) imagination to reconstruct the rest of the animal.

 More sketching at the Idaho Museum of Natural History! They asked me if I would draw their new Oryctodromeus mount, which has updated physiology based on new research. Most noticeable are the shorter legs and much longer tail, but it also seems to have a proportionately larger head. You can see the difference between this and previous drawings based on the older interpretation. 

You can check out the relevant paper here.

 

I'm super excited to announce that the revised edition of Pixeldust is now live on the Kindle store (and in paperback)!

I went into detail about why I decided to do a revision, and what exactly I revised, in this blog post. I really feel that all the issues with the original are fixed now, and it's something that both my current editor and I are satisfied with.

If you haven't read Pixeldust yet, please give it a spin! My editor loved it and she's not even a geeky gamer like yours truly!

 More old art!

Neopets had several paint brush colours in the early days (before even I started playing) that were rather swiftly retired and converted into a completely different aesthetic (such as Glass becoming Tyrannian) as the art style of the site became more polished. Unicorn (down at the bottom of the page) was a colour with some cool potential, but in reality it was just... a white Neopet with a doofy horn sticking out of its head.

So, I thought it would be fun to play around with ideas for a "revamped" Unicorn style that actually altered a pet's appearance more and... looked better. Man, I'd love a qilin Moehog!

Also featuring my redesign for Grarrl physiology, because as a paleoartist, the canon designs for Grarrls and Chombies are a huge pet peeve of mine (or were when I still played the website, I guess). I hate that they have all the paleontological accuracy of a 1960's Saturday morning cartoon, and I'm a huge advocate for taking the time and effort to make sure current representations of dinosaurs in the media are scientifically-informed. 

Dinosaurs are not fantasy creatures that exist only in popular imagination--they are as real as living animals, just a few million years removed from us. I'm not saying everyone's got to stay on the cutting edge of the latest scientific literature, but would it kill filmmakers and toy designers to, say, put feathers on theropods, make sure their sauropods aren't dragging their tails, and just stop pronating those hands pleaseandthanks?

I'm barely letting the Jurassic Park/World franchise slide with this, simply because the original novel, and several parts in the films, state that the creatures in the movies aren't "real" dinosaurs, but genetic chimeras created for entertainment purposes, and the scientists are aware that their clones sometimes take some serious creative license. But everybody else needs a better excuse than "well, this is what dinosaurs looked like when I was a kid".

It's probably something silly to expect from a cartoony virtual pet website, but considering how gorgeous the rest of the Neopets artwork is, and the incredible amount of depth and lore the site contains that really make Neopia come alive, it's just too weird to me to have blobby kid-drawing-style dinosaurs waddling around an otherwise really sophisticated and well-designed world.

I mean no offense to Donna Williams and all the work she put in as the original (and at first only) Neopets artist, but as the franchise's aesthetic evolved and became more polished, Grarrls and Chombies should have gotten a glow-up as well. Many (actually most) Neopets species underwent redesigns before the advent of pet customisation, and to me it just feels like those two Tyrannian species are painfully still stuck in the site's Stone Age (pun intended).

/nerdy rant

 More doodling! This is a concept sketch for Saturos, one of the main characters of a novel I'm working on. He's basically a goat-demigod, and while he likes to make an intimidating first impression and generally thinks lowly of humans for being so xenophobic, he is really a benevolent ruler and caring person.

When Saturos kidnaps entitled teenager Tam's sickly older sister, Tam follows him into another world populated entirely by inhuman creatures. On her quest to reach Castle Ravenscrag, Tam discovers that she has the ability to undo the seals binding powerful elementals who join her in her journey, and learns a few life lessons along the way. But these seemingly friendly elementals may not be telling her the whole story behind why Saturos sealed them away in the first place. Can Tam figure out who to trust before it's too late for both worlds?

Meanwhile, Tam's overstressed college student sister Carrie finds herself a "guest" in the foreboding Castle Ravenscrag. Not content to simply be a damsel in distress while her sister gets to go on a character-building epic quest, Carrie discovers that she possesses mysterious powers, and those powers are the reason Saturos brought her to his world. She also finds that he isn't nearly as villainous as he originally seemed, and he needs her help restoring the balance of his world before everything falls to ruin and chaos. Carrie's life at Castle Ravenscrag is much more fulfilling than back on Earth, and she will ultimately have to choose between meeting her parents' and society's expectations, or being happy.

It's been a fun story to work on. I enjoyed twisting some overdone stock character roles, and incorporating important messages about gratitude, selflessness, priorities, and following your heart instead of automatically letting everyone else dictate how your life should go.