I was noodling around on my tablet and ended up sketching a very rough mockup of a potential cover for the novel I'm working on. It's a tale of two sisters--one on a character-building epic quest, and the other on an inner journey of self-discovery. It's also got magic and creatures and a goat demigod. Good times.

I was kinda playing around with making it look like an 80's fantasy film poster, because those were my childhood. <3 We'll see if I go with this for the actual cover. (I'm still trying to figure out Saturos's hair. He's being difficult. I'll get him right one of these days.)

The critters in the top left corner are things I actually made up in high school, and then completely forgot about until I realized they would work great in this story.

 Actually, they should make that game.

 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.