MaggieJo 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?

 I decided to do something I haven't really done in a while and just sit and sketch. I used to sketch prodigiously when I was a teenager and in college. Unfortunately, 99% of what I filled my sketchbooks with in high school was absolute rubbish, mostly janky anime-styled lame character designs from before I learned how to draw, and doodles from franchises I was largely into just to try to please a friend who frankly didn't care about me nearly as much. 

For a while I kept those sketchbooks because of the presumed importance of an artist keeping a thorough record of her work, but finally a few years back I decided I couldn't stand to look at them anymore, and I threw them all away. If that makes any of you cringe, you're honestly not missing much. I really doubt a pencil drawing of an awful Mega Man fan design with terrible anatomy is of any relevance to anyone. It makes me sort of sad that I spent day after day in high school churning out that sort of nonsense instead of actually taking the time to learn to draw and have better friends. Oh well, live and learn.

Right, about the sketches--these are some concept doodles for a novel manuscript I've been working on. I wanted the Plainsmen to have facial features reminiscent of the Middle East and southwest Asia. They're loosely based on the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans, but also take inspiration from the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin. Also a portrait of Jawwad because he's great. I really enjoyed writing the Quo Qu--they're intellectual, numbers-obsessed, and slightly unscrupulous, which is an entertaining combination. But Jawwad comes through for Arun's family in the end.

I was hanging out with my awesome paleo buddies Ashley Hall and MaggieJo Widdicombe at the Museum of the Rockies's Virtual Fossil Fridays, and MaggieJo, who loves Pachyrhinosaurus, pointed out that P. lakustai has a single horn on its forehead anterior to its frill, and she thought that made it look like a unicorn. She then said she'd love to see an actual P. lakustai unicorn, and I just had to draw that.

Man, I want an entire toy line of dinosaurs turned into fantasy creatures. I would have gone crazy for that as a kid. I was a strange child. While other girls my age were playing with dolls or crushing on boy bands, I was reading encyclopedias and building computers. And I turned out just fine(????).

One of my (many) paleo art pet peeves is when people under-muscle dinosaurs. I see this a lot with ceratopsians and hadrosaurs. Some reconstructions just give them these way twiggy limbs, which is ludicrous considering how much bulk those limbs are supposed to be holding up. You can't follow limb bones too closely when putting flesh on an animal--there's a lot of muscle and skin built around those things. If you look at the skeleton of a rhinoceros (a good modern equivalent to a ceratopsian), they actually have rather svelte limb bones--it's just that they're well-covered with thick muscle and tough hide. Let's make our dinosaurs adequately chonky, folks! Soft tissue is a thing!