Another Edition of Sketchbook Backlogs - Part 3

And now for the last post of this little series. Monday we looked at misc. cartoons. Yesterday we looked at lots of creatures. And today we have various animals (ahem...mostly dinosaurs). Enough dilly-dallying...Here we go!

Let's start with some Mammals -

1. A Big Cat Study

2. A Capybara

3. A Hippo Squiggle

Now for the Dinos -

4-6. Brachiosaurs!

6. A Hadrosaur

 7. Ceratopsians

8. A Puffin Squiggle

9. A Parakeet Skull

10. A Maniraptoran

11-12. Tyrannosaurs

13. A Sketch Page with various Birds

(A Gator snuck in...and that Creature on the bottom-right - not dinosaurs, I'm well aware. My most sincere apologies...)

14. And one of the most amazing dinosaurs of all, the Raven

And that's all the doodles I have for you as of now! Thanks for tuning in.

Best,

  Evan

Another Edition of Sketchbook Backlogs - Part 2

Today I'm continuing on with digitizing miscellaneous things from various sketchbooks. Yesterday was an assortment of random cartoony things. Today is all creatures that just came off the top of my head during the drawing process.

Speaking of which, I guess I'll briefly describe my typical doodling approach, as it's probably not the way others go about drawing things. 7 times out of 10, when drawing I don't have any idea what I'm drawing. I just start scribbling down shapes and forms and see what I can turn them into. It's a very free form improvised approach, and I find it's a great way to experiment with different styles. Often I try to surprise myself. If I figure out early on roughly what the sketch will turn out to be, I'll often times try to steer in another direction just to force myself to think of other possibilities. Sometimes this turns out terribly, and other times it creates some very interesting results. Sometimes I'll even be halfway through a character and then suddenly see a way to change it around into something different.

Enough blabbing. Here are 12 creature drawings for you:

1. Some sort of Reptilian Apex Predator with Insect-like Mouthparts

2. This little Lizard-Thing:

3. This Unexpected Duo

4. A Knuckle-Walking Camel Beast

5. A Terror-Bird-Like Creature 

6. This (Yeah, I have no clue what it is either...)

7. An Oviraptor-Like Creature among other doodles

8. A Heavily-Armored Knuckle-Walker

9. A Griffin Bust

10. This Marsupial-like Critter

11. An Ant-Eating-Something-or-Other

12. A Mythical Feline

Tomorrow will be the last in this current series of sketchbook backlogs. The topic will be real animals (albeit some stylized ones. Oh, yeah...and a large majority of them are dinosaurs. So you've been warned).

Until the next time,

Evan

Another Edition of Sketchbook Backlogs - Part 1

I haven't digitized any of my doodles in a long time. Not having easy access to a scanner anymore makes this sort of thing happen less often. But I figured too much time has passed, and so I spent a good amount of time today photographing various sketches from 3 or 4 different sketchbooks and notepads. Some of these sketches are a few months old but some of them are from a year ago or longer. Just never got around to putting them up.

Enough prefacing, here are 25 random little things for you! They are in no particular order.

1. A Feisty Lobster

2. A Zombie Simian 

3. Whatever this guy is:

 4. A Creepy Cat and an Insect-in-a-Coat

5. A Crazy Dude

6. A Sloth in a Hat being attacked by a Robot

7. Earl the Walrus

8. Some sort of Raccoon-like Critter

9. THE LOBSTER-MAN

10. Another Sloth

11. Little Dudes having a Blast on a Cliff

12. Some Cartoony Muscular Dudes

13. This Guy:

14. A Boy and his Hadrosaur

15. This Alien Guy:

16. Curious Bignosington

17. A Happy Dino

18. A Gremlin Dude

19. A Scared Pooch

20. A Cocky Budgie

21. A Penguin

22. A Page from a notebook featuring an old dude, a mudskipper, and others

23. An Angry Critter

24. A Pigeon and a Salamander

25. A Horrendous Eight-Armed Cat Thing

That was just the first wave. The next wave is going to be all creatures. Stay Tuned!

Best,

  Evan

Old Prospector

Why aren't there any young prospectors?

Probably because they're not any fun if they're not old and senile.

-Evan

Skeletal Mount Makin'

So this is something a bit different. Still creative, but no sketches or CG for you today.

This does require a bit of a explanation though. At work, in order to make my space my-own, I decided to fill it with all things Zoology and Paleontology related. I went ahead and purchased a number of specimens for my desk, with the idea to slowly build a collection over the years, and eventually turn my area into a mini natural history museum of sorts.

So I went ahead and got a number of things, and also put up posters and diagrams and whatnot on my walls. There was one problem though. Decently sized to larger specimens are, for obvious reasons, expensive. I bought a number of cool smaller things to get the most bang for my buck, and give myself a decent heads start on the collection. The problem though, was that they are not easily visible in passing, and one would have to walk right up to my shelf to really see what's there:

See? Other than the two guys on the right, you really can't see what we got here. What's that? What are those two tiny things next to the Velociraptor skull you ask? (I'm asking for you since you can't see them)

Believe it or not, there is a little Archaeopteryx skull, and some odds and ends of a Parakeet. Clearly these guys needed to make themselves more visible! (Or...rather...I need to make them more visible. Since...you know. One's dead and the other's a model.) This is where I came up with the idea to build little custom mounts for them. And that's what this post is about.

 I did a test with a really simple mount for the Archaeopteryx skull, as a proof of concept to myself:

Turned out to be a bit easier than I expected. Just a wooden base, easily pliable wire, Wire cutters/pliers, super glue, and an xacto-knife. With this working, I decided to go a bit further and try to make a more complex mount for the parakeet. Same materials. Here's the mount by itself:

...and once all the pieces were locked in place*:

*I didn't bother mounting the lower jaw because of how fragile the skull is. Didn't want to break anything, so I just set it on the base...

Thought it worked fairly well for my first crack at this sort of thing, with the materials I had available. For future mounts I'd like to do a bit more planning, and to make the armatures less noticeable. This time around I had general concepts in mind and just went for it; testing and seeing how the materials would lend to my initial ideas. But at least my guys have a more pleasant home:

I would like to do more of this sort of thing pending new specimens.

Best,

  Evan

Robosaurolophus

Wow, just looked at the date. Sorry it's been a while... I have no excuses, really...

Today, I was given a task by a friend. He said to draw him a robot dinosaur while listening to Memphis Blues. I know, it's a little random. But he gave me until he got back from grocery shopping to complete it, which turned out to be about an hour. Here is what I hastily came up with:

I call it Parasaurolophus mechanichensis

Until the next sketch,

  Evan