Color study for Wix, the fairy knight from the story I'm working on. I've been having a lot of fun incorporating bits of Celtic, Irish, and Welsh mythology as well as medieval fairy folklore. This is in keeping with the fact that what we now call "fairies" actually evolved culturally from the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish mythology, a race of highly magical supernatural beings who are largely cognate with Celtic deities. Which, honestly, I think is a lot more interesting than little butterfly-winged women sitting on flowers, in the Victorian tradition.

The book explores how the once-powerful Tuath Dé lost the British Isles to mortals and became reduced to diminutive, rarely-sighted beings, and what might happen if the fair folk ever decided to try to take the mortal world back. It also details a journey through Annwn, the otherworld, where time and space and physics don't really work the same way as humans are used to.

Also, in the book, fairies don't always have wings, just when they need to fly.

 

And more sketching from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. As part of their super fun timeline of Earth's evolutionary history since the Devonian, they've got a beautiful 3D print of a Dinogorgon skull, and I've attempted to do a life reconstruction before, but it keeps staring me in the face every time I walk past it and I just really wanted to try a frontal view. I feel like one sees an excess of side views of gorgonopsid faces in both paleoart and photos of fossils, and while they did have very lovely profiles, let us not forget that these creatures also had a front end.

I went for a bit of hybrid media this time--brush pen for the line work, put down some grayscale marker for the shading, and added color with colored pencil (and white gel pen for a bit of highlighting, but gel pen doesn't really play nicely with pencil).

Dinogorgon didn't have a fat face--it's got these wide flanges on its skull that likely anchored powerful neck and jaw muscles.

 

Finally got to doing another sketch at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Here's their oviraptorosaur mount from a different angle because ovis just have the most lovely profiles.

(Also because - to my deepest shame - I only recently learned that scleral rings are actually located inside the eyball, not outside of it, and thus most of the eyes on my life restorations are actually too small. My hunger for scientific accuracy compels me to therefore re-draw every fossil mount with correctly proportioned eyes. Alas, this is the sort of thing that happens when one majored in animation in college instead of paleontology.)

You may notice that I don't usually restore a dinosaur the same way twice. That's because I don't really have a "headcanon" for how any particular dinosaur ought to look, outside of what's been confirmed by fossil evidence (for example, Borealopelta was reddish-brown with a lighter underside, Microraptor was extensively feathered, etc.). So I enjoy experimenting with different looks, including feathering extent/patterns, pupil shape, and the like. Honestly that's one of the fun parts about paleoart for me, is that there's a considerable amount of creative wiggle room.

 

I'm so glad the first two Golden Sun games were put on Nintendo Switch, because I've been playing the life out of them. I hadn't played them since they first came out, and now I'm falling in love with them all over again--the gameplay is well-thought-out and satisfying, and the plot and lore are great.

I just wish there was more Golden Sun for us to enjoy! Another game in the series is way overdue, and honestly, I'd love a Golden Sun MMORPG. You could pick your Adept element and then wander the wide world of Weyard, having adventures with friends or on your own, finding Djinn, learning summons... I'd sink so many hours into that.

Anyway, here's a random character design just because.

As a side note, I have no idea how I ever finished the first Golden Sun game without a walkthrough the first time around (that was in the Dark Ages before readily accessible online walkthroughs). I actually didn't get very far into The Lost Age because I reached a point where I just had no idea what to do. So it's been super fun to actually get further in the game this time and realize just how much I missed out on. I have no idea how they managed to pack that much RPG into one GBA cartridge, and I'm not complaining.

Hollyweird must go

Much of this blog post is based on an op-ed letter I sent to a newspaper, which didn't get published, and I'm not really surprised because I'm kind of a maverick. But it's mavericks who get stuff done. And I felt that the message was important enough that I can at least share it on my blog.

I write this with the full knowledge that it will shock and offend people. And I don't mean the kind of offensive that's morally repugnant. I mean offending people who have gone along with society's status quo and lulled themselves into believing they don't have to make an effort. Who prioritize money and comfort over integrity. They won't like what I'm about to say, because as a Christian, I follow a divine Master who is inviting humanity to rise from the slums of mediocrity and minimal effort and discover the joy, fulfilment, and potential of walking a higher path and not settling for the devil's destructive lies.

Christian leader Jeffrey R. Holland put it masterfully in this talk about what it means to truly be a disciple of Christ. It's not the easy or popular thing to do, but history has shown that what is easy and popular is never what is truly worthwhile. 

To accomplish anything with real meaning and impact, people have to stretch themselves, think for themselves, and stand their moral ground, and a prime example of where this isn't happening is the entertainment and media industry. And not just the creators and executives--I'm also calling out audiences for letting things slide.

Real talk: Hollywood is crumbling, and it's time for a revolution on both fronts.

The tired myth of the "Mary Sue"

Today, I'd like to discuss a notion that's been on my mind for a while now: the concept of the "Mary Sue" and why writers need to just let it go. I'd been trying to wait for a good opportunity to appropriately soapbox, but then I figured, there's no better place to soapbox than one's own blog. And yes, I look at the visitor statistics, so I know people are seeing this. Time for another essayrant (new portmanteau I just invented).

As someone who regrettably grew up doing a lot of writing networking over the Internet (I feel like no one should ever spend their youth doing any sort of networking over the Internet), I was quickly exposed to the world of fanfiction, and the world of people who read and discuss fanfiction. Both are equally terrifying in their own ways.

Fanfiction is exactly what it claims to be: original fiction pieces written by fans of a fictional work, purely for fun (or sometimes more for social clout in the fan community). There is no quality control much like independent publishing. I have read some very, very good fanfiction by talented writers that could easily be turned into licensed novels. I have also read some fanfiction that would only make the publishing cut with a lot of editing and much more skill development on the part of the writer.

But you know what? In fanfiction, an amateur labor of love for something you're emotionally invested in, writing skill doesn't actually matter all that much, in my opinion. What I really think is a bigger problem is when other fans read said fanfiction and proceed to critically tear it apart unsolicited--or worse, publicly denounce it and make fun of it. And nowhere have I seen more of this than attacks on what are perceived as "Mary Sues"--or, to put the issue in its real light, character shaming.

The first 35 minutes of the Thunder Girl audiobook are now available to listen to for free on YouTube! Now you can preview the book before committing to it. I love Benjamin Fife's performance here and I think he had a lot of fun working on this project.

As an aside, I'm still putting together plans for a sequel. I've been waylaid a bit by other stuff, but I have another fun story I want to tell about Cat and her motley crew, an eccentric Scottish vampire (I guess all vampires are a little eccentric), a reawakened Egyptian mummy, and Australian Pleistocene megafauna. You'll see how I tie all that together. :)

More old art. I was so worried I'd lost these, so I'm really glad I found them floating around my hard drive.

These are portraits I did for Blynn, Hyren, and Suhel (I guess that's obvious) for some profiles I did of them. I still like these pics despite their age, and now I can link to them in Neopets stories that I put here on the blog.

I just wanted to do a sketch of Financier Cookie and Clotted Cream Cookie from the Crème Republic storyline in Cookie Run: Kingdom, which was awesome. Financier rocks.

This picture is actually based off of this illustration which was posted on the official CRK Twitter account.

When the Crème Republic storyline first started, I was absolutely certain Clotted Cream Cookie was the bad guy. With that smug smirk and charismatic demeanor and super fancy clothes, I just knew he was hiding something. 

Okay, that's not the first or last time I've been wrong about someone being the villain. Maybe I have trust issues.

More old art. This is from when Pokémon Go first came out and I was so totally psyched to have a Pokémon adventure in real life.

Then I moved someplace that didn't have nearly as many Gyms or PokéStops, and that kind of killed the fun a bit. So I'm looking forward to Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link, which has a somewhat similar concept but the ability to actually move your character on the map independently of where you happen to be.

(Don't get me wrong, I still play Pokémon Go, just not as often nowadays given the circumstances.)

Updates have been kind of sparse because I've been busy, and because it's been really snowy here which has impeded my ability to get to the museum to sketch. And also because I am - I think understandably - a bit miffed that people don't seem to be paying attention to my work despite my best efforts, so I'm not exactly feeling super motivated to produce/post more of it.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I said I'd be uploading more old art, so here are a few pieces I submitted to the Art Gallery on Neopets. I can't remember which of them actually got in, and unfortunately the AG does not have a function to search submissions by username like the Neopian Times does, but if you're feeling really bored, you can go through the thousands of AG pages and try to find these. 

This is how Blynn solves the Negg Cave puzzle. She's not really interested in being normal.

A clever way to lose friends quickly.

Mostly I just wanted to have fun painting the Ghost Lupe's flowy ghost tendrils. Ah, the joys of obscure and underutilized canon characters.

Okay but when will that storm on Lutari Island ever end? (For those not in the know, this is the in-universe excuse for why an area exclusive to a dead mobile app can't be accessed on the website.)

Grey Neopets and Petpets are just not my thing at all, but Grey Day was coming up, so. Although, Millie Browning from my fanfics is a Grey Ogrin (albeit a non-emo one). And I did have fun incorporating the lore of Grey Faeries into The Spirit of Black Keep.

More sketching fun from the Idaho Museum of Natural History! They've got a Protoceratops mount in their current fossil exhibition about fossils from the Wayan Formation. While no fossils from the Wayan have yet been identified as Protoceratops, there are a few fragments of ceratopsian fossils that may have belonged to a close relative, as around that time there was a land bridge between Asia and western North America, and the fauna of the Wayan is very reminiscent of parts of Asia (including my homies the oviraptorosaurs).

I gave it whiskers because Protoceratops remind me a bit of pigs (in a good, cute way). It could have happened!

Another thing that's fun about sketching paleoart from fossil mounts in real life is that you can choose whatever angle you want; most photos of fossil mounts on the Internet are side views, sometimes face-on, but in this case I was standing right next to something about the size of a golden retriever and wanted to try drawing it from my vantage point looking down at it. I think the result actually gives more of an impressions like you're taking the family pet out for a walk; much more nonthreatening than dinosaurs are often portrayed. 

More sketching from the Idaho Museum of Natural History! Have I mentioned lately how much I love living five minutes away from a natural history museum?

This one was inspired by a chat with Dr. L. J. Krumenacker at a recent museum event where we discussed the mobility range of Oryctodromeus tails (pro tip, if you come give a paleontology lecture at the museum I will badger you with weird questions afterward). Oryctos, like most ornithopods, had tails that were strongly reinforced with tendons, limiting up-down flexibility (so no, no tail-dragging hadrosaurs like you see in older art), but Dr. Krumenacker said these tendons didn't affect lateral movement. I was seeking to understand how it is that oryctos had tails longer than their bodies but lived in burrows only 25 centimeters in diameter, and I suspect they curled up rather like this.

If you'll notice, a little friend is peeking in to say hello; fossil orycto burrows have indeed been found with much smaller burrows off to the sides, strongly suggesting that mammals co-opted the tunnels like a Cretaceous apartment building.

Why I'm not going back to Neopets

It's time for another highly opinionated rant, and with a provocative title like that, you know you want to read more. Actually probably nobody cares, but sometimes it just feels good to blog out my feelings, especially when it's a subject that I feel passionately about and has been a big part of my creative life. Besides, on the off chance that people actually pay attention to my Neopets work and are wondering why I no longer submit to the Neopian Times, am not pursuing a more prominent position in the fan community, etc., this post will explain it.

Spoilers: If you actually like the direction Neopets has been going lately, you will not agree with this post. You have been warned. I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm just feeling some feelings right now and want to air them for anybody curious, since at one point I was a mildly prolific Neopian Times writer.

Also, this is a long read, so buckle up. I've got several bones to pick.

A bit of costume design doodling for one of the novels I'm working on. These are the outfits Arun and Liu use when the Plainsmen winter over in Toba, a coastal desert city that stays nice and balmy in winter (which sounds really good right about now). In Toba, the Plainsmen go into vacation mode and dress up a little more than their usual lifestyle allows.

Also, that really is the size discrepancy between them. Plainsmen are huge, and the Xiaohe (Liu's ethnicity) are a bit on the small side. That's why Xiaohe don't ride kelenken--they're just not tall enough to get into the saddle. (Kelenken are about six feet tall at the hip.)

A few more concept sketches for that novel idea I've been tossing around.

Pashta is Arun's kid sister. High-spirited and a bit mischievous, she is curious about the culture of the simplefaces (the Plainsmen's somewhat derogatory term for non-Plainsman humans), and is excited to have a simpleface join the tribe so they can both learn from each other.

Liu is a most peculiar simpleface from a small, remote village who learned to read and write from traveling merchants, and is always hungry for more knowledge. She hated her life in the village, so at the nearest opportunity she joined the Plainsmen, and upon discovering that they transmitted all of their history and culture orally, she invented a writing system for them so they could keep things documented better. She wishes the Plainsmen and simplefaces could get along better, but perhaps the key to peace between them can be found in the mysterious origins of the Plainsmen.

I actually came up with the idea of Pashta and the Plainsmen waaaaaay back in high school. Back in my initial concept, Pashta was the main character, but I struggled to come up with a plotline other than "Pashta doinks around". It wasn't until very recently that I realized the sort of narrative I wanted to tell involved an outsider from another culture finding her place among the Plainsmen and helping them resolve centuries of conflict. It may have relegated Pashta to being a secondary protagonist, but her effervescence adds some levity to the plot and it amuses me when she messes with Arun just to see him squirm. She's a good little sister like that.

I've been tossing around ideas for a new novel and I couldn't help but do a sketch. The Plainsmen are a race of nomadic warriors who inhabit the Sogen, a vast steppeland. They ride giant birds called kelenken, and are distinguished from other humans not only by their larger and stronger build, but by the fact that they are all born with blue markings on their faces, with designs unique to each individual. The Plainsmen have an oral history that states their ancestors sailed across a vast ocean long ago and landed their ship on the Sogen, which is peculiar since the grassland is hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. 

This is Arun, one of the main protagonists, and his mount Vy. While a formidable foe in battle, Arun is a super nice and friendly guy who is very devoted to his family.

(Also, I totally based the kelenken on phorusracids because I can't resist a good paleontology reference.)

More old art, experimenting with a more vertical format.

A lot of these older pieces were from two 100-picture challenges I worked on over a number of years. I challenged myself to create one finished piece for each item on both lists, so it took quite a while. That'll teach me to hop on the bandwagon of people doing things on the Internet. :)

I was going through my hard drive and realized I actually have a lot of my older art still floating around, so I thought I'd share it here on the blog. A lot of this art was previously shared on social media accounts that are long dead, so if any of this looks familiar, that's why. I think my blog is a much better and more permanent home for it.

First off, here are my best pieces from my sculpting class in college. It was the only art class I took that semester, and definitely my most challenging and work-intensive class that semester. It doesn't help that I'm rubbish at working with my hands (just keep me away from any home improvement projects), so going outside of 2D drafting was a big stretch. My teacher was fantastic, though, and I somehow managed to pass the class.

I decided to try for an overarching theme with most of my work in the class, trying to make them look like artifacts from a vanished civilization. The exception is that first piece, where the assignment was to make a kinetic sculpture out of objects purchased at a grocery store, so I tried to make a representation of microbes on a microscope slide.