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.

 

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.

The other day I sat and did something I haven't done in a while--free doodling where I just sketched whatever was on my mind.

These first two are character designs for a Digimon OC made up by a friend of mine who started a Digimon RP way back in high school. The RP never finished because the guy suddenly went AWOL and never came back, as Internet friends are wont to do. But our group still had a fun time and made some good memories.

This character, Taki, I found really interesting from a development standpoint. She started out as an antagonist hunting down the Digidestined (the roleplayers' characters) for an unknown reason. Eventually it was revealed that Taki had been accidentally transported to the Digital World as an infant, and raised as a warrior by Goldramon, the ruler of this version of the Digital World. When Goldramon was infected by a virus due to the actions of the real villains, he began acting erratically and ordered Taki to destroy the Digidestined. 

Eventually the heroes had to defeat Goldramon in battle and free him from the virus by deleting him, but not before he revealed to Taki her true origins, and told her that she was in fact also a Digidestined, at which point she joined the group  to take down the bad guys behind the Digital World's problems. I got to make up her Digimon partner, who was pretty much a purple bat version of Renamon. Maybe I'll do a redesign sketch of her one of these days.

The reason there are two character designs is because the first one was my initial design for her when I doodled stuff about the RP. The second design is actually closer to the RP creator's design for her, which he showed us a few months in to the RP when he finally managed to get some of his artwork onto the Internet. This was in the Stone Age before smartphones and social media, when that kind of thing was much more difficult, especially for teenagers who couldn't afford digital cameras, flatbed scanners, or drawing tablets (and there were maybe like one or two types of good free art software available).

These days I'm more into writing solo, but these old character designs bring back a lot of nostalgia for me. (Also, more Digimon games need to come out. Including the ones that are already out in Asia and the rest of the world isn't getting for some reason.)

And here's a sketch for a story idea I've been working on. Kitsuko "Kit" Nonaka is a 350-year-old kitsune who is fascinated by human culture. When she's not working to preserve the tenuous peace between humans and youkai in cyberpunk Kyoto, she's busy geeking out on the Internet--the one place where nobody has to know that she herself is a youkai.

 Here's another old character design. I came up with this girl in high school; she was supposed to be a combination swordswoman-ninja, and her storyline involved her being the only source of justice on a lawless desert planet. The overall concept was kind of boring, but maybe one day I'll find a better story to put her in.

 Couple old Pokémon illustrations.

Having just finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and started Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (the Switch remaster, which makes me feel really really old because I played the original when it first came out), I've had game design on the brain. It got me to pondering what Pokémon can do better moving forward, so we don't get another title with the weaknesses of Scarlet and Violet.

 I wrote two articles for the Neopian Times where Blynn reviewed Neopian books under the alias of the Scrivener, a mysterious rogue who skulked about in the shadows leaving book reviews in the name of literary enlightenment. They were fun, but ultimately I was more interested in writing short stories and series. I still love the idea of Blynn as the Scrivener though. She gets up to all sorts of shenanigans when she's bored.

 Here's an old character design that I'm still rather fond of. 

This character, a shadow dragon who can assume a human form, has a long design history that stretches all the way back to high school, where I drew a short manga (I won't post it here because it's eye-burningly lame) about three dragon brothers (who could also turn into humans) who defeated a shadow dragon who was threatening the city, and then they all went out to lunch for some reason. Their conversation vaguely alluded to something having happened to the other shadow dragons, and then the dragon girl ran off in a bout of mysterious teen angst (requisite for manga)... and that was really as far as I got with the storyline. I think later I also threw in some stuff about dragon hunters threatening the dragons, and this character's sister secretly working with the hunters to destroy her own people for some unclear reason, but it never really got anywhere coherent. Boy was I bad at story development back then. (Her dragon form was pretty unique though, basically a large theropod with raven wings.)

Some years later, I retooled and rebooted the whole concept into a historical fantasy that takes place during the Middle Ages, where this character is a spunky young Persian dragon with a djinn companion, and the two of them must travel to hopelessly backwards Europe to find other dragons who have been masquerading as humans and enlist their help with a problem that threatens all dragonkind. It's a story I'm still working on fleshing out. Should be fun, but I've got other novel ideas to work through first.

 Well, at least we've still got the Smicar of Steven.

 What Happens When You Give Your Niece the Controller, Part II.

Once I got on a kick where I drew a bunch of human versions of Neopets canon characters. The War for the Obelisk plot introduced so many great characters and some awesome lore. I miss when Neopets still had good writing.

 More old PokéFusions. Most of these are face shots because the software that generated the fusion basically just put the face and color scheme of one sprite onto the body of another sprite.

Couple more old Neopets doodles.

Concept sketches for Hyren in both his blue and mutant forms. I just love the idea of Grundo antennae expressing emotion, such as lowering when a Grundo is annoyed or twitching if they're taken aback.

 I drew this for the Art Gallery, it didn't get in, and I'm not surprised because it doesn't make much sense out of the context of knowing who my Neopets are. But I still think it's funny. The Sway mess with society, but who messes with the Sway? Blynn, of course. :)

I hadn't done any Cookie Run fan art in a while, so here's Cloud Haetae Cookie from the super epic Mystic Flour Cookie storyline in Cookie Run: Kingdom. Her character design is so adorable. I know technically she's a villain, but I don't think she's a bad creature at heart; as a haetae, it's just her job to be loyal to the master of the Ivory Pagoda. And you can't dislike a creature that loves belly rubs.

 

Here's some old Cambrian fan art! <3 (Is it fan art or paleoart when you're doodling prehistoric critters just because you love them? I guess it's both.)

I liked how the Alalcomenaeus turned out so much that I made it into a painting, although I was working from some poorly preserved fossils so there's a lot wrong with the anatomy (missing great appendages and median eyes, telson is the wrong shape entirely, etc.). This is an extremely speculative reconstruction that definitely crosses the line into fanciful, but I just really liked the idea of a megacheiran with an iridescent carapace and brine shrimp-like feathery gills. You never know, it could have happened.

This was all from just one brief play session.

This kid is comedy gold.

 Move over, Calamity Ganon. This kid's got the destruction of Hyrule covered.

 To be fair, the game has the same effect on adults.

She doesn't really read the game text super closely. 

Consequently, everyone and everything in Hyrule has been renamed. 

 More old art. Someone on Neopets asked me to draw a robot Ixi, and I wasn't very good at saying "no" back then. Turned out pretty nice, though.

Thought I'd change it up a bit from the string of Zelda comics with more old art. Back in the day, someone created a "PokéFusion" web page that combined two different random sprites of Gen I Pokémon, and it became a thing in the Pokémon art community to draw these amusing hybrid creatures. I tried my hand at a few myself. 

After I posted my feelings about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and as I've been playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom with their impeccable game design, I got to thinking about what exactly goes into a great Pokémon game, and what I'd like to see in future installments of the main series.

 

She also kept calling Vah Rudania "Vah RuDaniel Tiger", but I couldn't figure out a way to make that work in-universe.

 

It's because there aren't any horses in the Divine Beasts, I'm sure.

Still trying to convince her that this isn't Dreamlight Valley and expanding Link's wardrobe isn't one of the primary objectives of the game.

Sometimes I think she just enjoys making us find new characters for her to hate on.

She also thinks Kass is creepy and weird?!?!

 Gotta love a kid bouncing around in front of the TV while you're in the middle of a boss battle.

 

Kid logic: If you didn't like a plot point, it didn't happen.

If only.

By the way, everything in these comics are either direct quotes or paraphrases from things she has actually said while we play.

She gives me so much material.

 

No gallant poses allowed with this kid.

Prince Sidon is actually one of my favorite characters in Breath of the Wild. It took a lot for me to not say anything while she was talking smack about him literally the entire time we were in Zora's Domain. To each their own I guess.

 

An old random character design. I didn't really have any concrete plans for this character; it was mostly just me toying around with cyberpunk armor. But then I started to put together ideas for a story about a futuristic Kyoto, Japan, where a government agency seeks to preserve the delicate balance between humans and yōkai (supernatural spirit creatures in Japanese folklore) a decade after a devastating war between the two, and I realized this armor design would work great for the agency's field ops unit.

 

We've been trying to help her understand that the clothing options in the game are less about Link looking cool and more about him trying to stay alive.

It's not working.

 Sheikah monks are creepy. But cool. But creepy.

 

What happens when you give your niece the controller.

 Turns out video games are super easy when you've got someone else doing all the legwork for you. :)

More old art, this time of a Neopets character so obscure he's not even canon anymore. Sir Bold Heart was one of several very old Collectible Cards with dated artwork which were replaced by newer cards; if I remember correctly, it was around the time of Champions of Meridell and they were replaced by Meridell-themed cards.

Honestly I think Sir Bold Heart could have stayed with updated artwork; he clearly fits the Meridell vibe.

More Neopets clothing items modeled by Neopets (surprisingly enough).

I've been rather busy lately, but I was finally able to get back to the Idaho Museum of Natural History for more paleo doodling!

They've got a great cast of a Prosaurolophus skull, and I figured I needed more hadrosaurs in my life. I also wanted to illustrate a hadrosaur showing some of the more recent discoveries about this group's anatomy, such as the ridge along its back and a soft-tissue crest. Also important is the fact that hadrosaurs had a keratinized rhamphotheca (i.e. a beak) which allowed them to crop off bites of the tough vegetation that made up their diet. Any paleoart you see with a hadrosaur having a flat, kinda flabby-looking duck bill is inaccurate. 

As a matter of fact (and I am aware this is purely personal opinion and most people don't care), it gets on my nerves when hadrosaurs are called "duck-billed" dinosaurs because in life, the front of their mouths would have more resembled a turtle beak. "Duck-bill" also conjures images of these guys wading through swamps and scooping up mushy plants, when it has been known for decades that they were fully terrestrial and ate conifers and the like. It's an inaccurate and outmoded nickname and I really think it's got to go.

Anyway, that's just me being pedantic. Again.