Been sick for 3 days, and it’s kind of screwed up my blogging mojo.
Anyway, trying to get back on track:
I blocked in my colors, and experimented with the coloration on my dinos. I saw a dino on DA that had the horizontal stripe over its eye like that, and I liked it. A lot of lizards (and some fish, too) have a similar stripe … it’s like a superhero mask. I figure the male should be all bright flashy colors and the female can be all browns and creams.
I also realized that all the values in this pic are very close together. Check this out.
When converted to black and white, I don’t have any real good darks. So it’s back in to work on my shading.
Tags: blocked in colors, dinosaur, dinosaurs
I refined my stygimoloch sketch last night.
I love making ugly things cute. I think their very ugliness makes them cuter … it stops being “ugly” and becomes “character”.
I was looking for skeletons and skull reference, and ran across this.
Doesn’t it look like a dragon skull? It just needs bigger teeth and a heavier jaw is all!
Also, see the dome on top of the skull? The longer I looked at that silly dome, the more I thought of this.
This is a helmeted guinea fowl. They have one of the more hilarious faces in the poultry world. Anyway, now all I can think of is a dinosaur with a face that color, with the little funky square waddles.
I was fishing around for some kind of oddball dinosaur to draw, and remembered the stygimoloch. So hilariously ugly.
Here’s a skull:
It’s related to those head-butting dinosaurs, the pachycephalosaurus. Only uglier. So I fiddled around, trying to figure out how to draw one, and settled for something whimsical.
He’s giving her a flower. “I’m ugly. Love me!”
Nobody draws dinosaurs doing cute things, unless they’re cartoony. Look at wolf art, and tigers, and lions, and any other modern predator you can think of. They’re mostly drawn cuddling with each other, or with their babies, or looking majestic, or awesome, or anything.
How are dinosaur predators drawn? Eating each other.
Do people draw tigers eating each other? Very rarely. Why? Because it’s not nice to look at.
No wonder people don’t really like dinosaurs. When they aren’t drawn eating each other, they’re drawn all weird and surreal-looking. And I’ve noticed that paleo-artists seem to throw all other rules of anatomy out the window when they draw dinosaurs. They draw dinosaurs all flat and pointy. Totally unlike modern reptiles, which are mostly built along the lines of a cylinder, or birds, which are built around the egg-shape.
Oh yeah, I could rant about this for hours.
Anyway, yeah, drawing some dinos. 
March came in like a lion this year, here and in a lot of other places. I got to thinking about what the March Lion might look like, and this pic came about.
I’d love to have some snowflakes blowing out of his mane, but then I’d love to include some flowers, too. I’ll have to play around with it.
I started scribbling, and this is what came out.
For some reason it looks like hot summer … maybe it’s all the white in the background and the contrast of the shading on the leaves. Leaf … scribbles. Whatever.
I forgot how liberating the scribble-shading technique in pen and ink can be. I think going back to Painter has actually been good for me art-wise, because I’m having to think in real media again. And plus it’s just relaxing to sit and draw whatever comes to mind.
This started out as just a sketch of a rider’s eye view if they were dragonback.
Then it turned into practice painting landscape perspective.
It kind of looks neat, though.
Art had ceased to be fun for me, so I’m trying to make it fun again.
Tags: blocked in colors, dragons, sketch
What do you get when you mix Megaman …
…with World of Warcraft?
Well … you get something that looks like this.
About all I can say for it is that it was fun to draw.
Tags: megaman, world of warcraft
