T. K. Arispe

 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 keep up with 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 wrists pleaseandthanks?

I'm barely letting the Jurassic Park/World franchise slide with this, simply because in the original book/film, it's made clear that the "dinosaurs" in the park are actually dinosaur-shaped genetic chimeras created for entertainment purposes, and Dr. Hammond invited professional paleontologists to the park to see if these chimeras looked close enough to the then-current image of dinos. 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