Cattle Studies

Doing some rough exploring/brainstorming:

After first relying heavily on reference imagery, and exploring the essence of what makes a bull a bull, I did a little playing around with stylization/proportion exaggeration:

That's all for now. Will probably be doing more of these, exploring some other bovines...

-Evan

Invasion of the Tetra Pod-Cats

So this is just a silly little thing I whipped up this weekend. It's inspired by some of the zaniness that comes up in the Tetrapod Zoology Podcast. While listening one episode, I got an image in my head of a stylized cat flying around in a little space pod, and after some rough doodles I decided I liked the idea enough to flesh it out more. So that's how I got to this:

(click to enlarge)

Clearly the drawing required not one, but four Pod-cats to make my pun, and it just so happens that there are four species of Lynx (which also happened to be a topic covered recently on the podcast podcats).

So left to right they are: bobcat (Lynx rufus), Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx)*, and the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis). You can see their species names embossed on the hulls of their ships if you ever get confused.

So there you have it, the Invasion of the Tetra Pod-Cats.

-Evan
* I imagine him to be the leader of this bunch - he looks the most serious about the invasion

Longisquama

Howdy Folks,

  Contributed this guy to the header for our 90 minute comics site you might have heard me talk about. I definitely spent too much time on him for the resolution of that header, but It's not everyday one draws Triassic Reptiles (unless, that's like, your thing - then I guess you do....but I certainly don't on a regular basis).

Anyway, thought I'd post a larger res version here (click for higher res). Oh, and the big beautiful Zero he's climbing on was drawn by Nate Shaw, just so we're all clear.


Until the Next Time!


  Evan

Of Comics and Dino-Evans

Hey Folks,

   Just wanted to plug a side blog I'm contributing to, along with a bunch of my cool friends. Every week we gather to draw a comic in 90 minutes, which is based on two random nouns. Head on over there to check out the first few posts. I didn't make it the first week due to a schedule conflict.

Also, I've been doing mine with pencil/paper lately, since my home computer is apparently too slow to run both a many-person google-hangout and a drawing program at the same time. I keep trying out different ones though, so maybe one of these days I'll get something working.

I also thought I'd post the drawing below, which I did to contribute to my silly bio page on the site. So in case you ever wondered what a Dino-Evan would look like, well here you go:

So be sure to subscribe/follow/whatever to 90 Minute Comics for a variety of weekly rough and silly comics!

See You There!

  Evan

I Scream

I drew this guy for a friend of mine, since he gestated in her mind. He also happens to be the next character in the series of creepy re-imaginings of child entertainers. Hardly a series at the moment...considering how long it's been since I've posted the last one. Although I like the idea of having a couple of different series going on, just so I have some things to continually go back to. Anyway. Enough blabbering. Meet the I-Scream Man:

I'm not sure what else to say about him...I think the image says it all. There are two or three other characters I have in mind for this series. But if anyone happens to be enjoying these guys, and has ideas for more, feel free to suggest some. Maybe it'll put pressure on me to post more often...

Best,

  Evan

Saturday Dinosaur Sketch

Hey Folks,

 It's been a while since I've posted (what else is new...) so I decided to do a dino sketch for today. I went with something I don't draw very often. So here's a sketch of Citipati (click for larger view) :

I tried to accomplish a few different things with this guy. Mostly getting away from things that seem to commonly appear in depictions of oviraptors.

I've seen a lot of artwork of oviraptors, and they always seem like a challenge. I will preface this discussion with the fact that I have seen a number of really good pieces of oviraptor art, so what follows doesn't apply to everyone. But I will say, that quite often depictions of these animals bother me for a couple of reasons.

Many times renditions of these guys end up looking like half-molted monsters. Granted, they're really freaky animals, but I feel like they could look a lot closer to an actual animal, and less like an abomination. I've also noticed a lot of people like to restore them to look like Cassowaries. And i'm not saying this because of the similarity with the crest.  I've seen renditions where color schemes are taken directly from cassowaries and applied to oviraptors; and I've seen it many times...by multitudes of different artists. The first time I saw this I thought it was clever and worked really well, but it seems to pop up again and again and has already turned into a paleoart meme of sorts.

So keeping that in mind, with this guy I tried to make him look fairly bird-like without completely overdoing it. I also wanted to get somewhere in between drab colors and extra flashy colors. It's become fashionable to get more interesting patterns and colors onto dinos these days, in thinking about sexual selection/display. I'm completely all about this, as it makes things visually interesting, but for this guy I wanted to include some features that could be used for display without going super saturated or over the top with the colors and patterns (after all, not all animals are peacocks). I went more with a colorful casque around the nostrils, and an iridescent head and neck (the idea being this would be more pronounced in the UV spectrum and would look more spectacular to an avian (or possibly dinosaurian?) eye).  I also think that a simple black and white striped pattern on the primary and tail feathers would make excellent display markings, especially in contrast to the rest of the more "drab" body integument.

So that's my thinking on this guy. I'm not entirely sure if I've ever drawn an oviraptor before. I'm by-no-means an expert on these bizarre theropods, so I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes in there. Just thought I'd take a crack at it on this Saturday night, as it seemed like an interesting problem to tackle :)

Best,

  Evan

Meep!

...need I say more?

-Evan