Just playing around with more graphic design. I need this on a t-shirt.

(Yes, that is my cat, a.k.a. His Most High Excellency Lord Sir Chewbacca Alfred, 15th Earl of Crumpkin, a.k.a. Mommy's Precious Pumpkin Predator Pants.)

 Another old piece. This was a panther martial artist character I semi-randomly made up and never did anything with. Back in junior high/high school/college, I often used to make up characters and vague storylines behind them, but not really do anything with them besides draw them a lot. I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do with characters; I guess it's just struck me looking back, how many characters I used to make up who never went anywhere, when nowadays I generally only create characters that are going in a written piece.

At any rate, I still like her design.

 Another old traditional piece. This is a life reconstruction of an ammonoid (possibly Parapuzosia seppenradensis) looking very hypothetically like a modern nautilus. Usually ammonoids are reconstructed with more octopus-like soft tissue, but from what I understand, so little ammonoid soft tissue has been found, it's still really up in the air what they looked like aside from their shells. I just like the idea of a 2-meter nautilus cruising along the oceans of the Cretaceous. I imagine you could probably hitch a ride on its shell and it wouldn't even notice.

Executed in brush pen and Prismacolor marker, with some white acrylic paint for accents. I love the look and feel of Prisma markers, but their two major downsides are that a) they are expensive and b) they're noxiously smelly so you have to use them in a well-ventilated area. That's why I haven't done much with them lately. If I had the budget, I would invest in some Copic markers, which last time I checked are hands-down the best art marker in the universe (and don't smell), but they're also on the pricey side. I guess that's probably why I do more digital work these days; traditional art is fun but the materials are so costly. /artist rant

 

Some doodles from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Oviraptorosaur foot study, wee orycto, and a species of fern actually found in the Wayan Formation.

 More museum sketching! They have an adorable little mount of Citipati that was just begging for some attention. I love that the Idaho Museum of Natural History is all about celebrating oviraptorosaurs right now!

 A random tablet doodle that turned out surprisingly well for how tired I was last night. I was just experimenting with oviraptorosaurs having plumage more like an ostrich and being adorably fluffy.

One of my paleoart pet peeves is when artists under-feather dinosaurs, as if they're begrudgingly painting a token thin veneer of drab integument onto the scaly dino shapes they grew up with and can't seem to shake. I love seeing artists get more creative with dinosaur soft tissue, because the more we learn about these incredible creatures, the more we discover that they were just as variable and visually interesting as modern animals. Most vertebrates actually look quite different from what their skeleton alone suggests, so it's silly to suppose that dinosaurs were the exception. It's the 21st century; let's move on from shrink-wrapped skin and noncommittal feathers, and start depicting dinos as real, functional biological organisms.

/rant

 Couple of oviraptorosaur hand studies from the Idaho Museum of Natural History. Ovis are one of my favorite dinosaur groups (the other two are therizinosaurs and abelisaurs), so I'm super psyched that ovi eggs have been found in the Wayan Formation and their (for now rather conjectural) parent is the star of the museum's current dinosaur exhibit.

One thing I'm not sure many people realize or appreciate is that (most) theropods actually had an opposable first digit and could grasp things very similarly to humans. So dromaeosaurs were really even more capable of opening doors than Jurassic Park depicts*! :)

Ovis probably had quite a bit more feathering than this, including ample pennaceous feathering on the arm, but I omitted those feathers in the interest of modeling their very cool hands.

*The caveat here is that theropods could not rotate their hands at the wrist like we can, so they couldn't really grab a doorknob and twist at the hand; they would have to move their entire arm from the shoulder. Yes, I have overthought this and pretended to be a theropod to see how it would work.

 More sketching at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. I've sketched their Suskityrannus mount before, but I wanted to do a head shot.

I'm aware that a lot of this museum sketching is really samey, and I apologize, but I have a certain repertoire of portable media that I've been working with, and often I only have a half hour or so to spend at the museum, so more complex illustrations, or anything involving color, are usually out of the question. At any rate, these are definitely just practice doodles. Doodle paleoart is better than no paleoart, right? Hypothetically?

For clarification, Suskityrannus has only been found in New Mexico; however, there are fragments of a very similar tyrannosauroid found in the Wayan Formation of eastern Idaho, so the IMNH has a suski mount to show what the Wayan's critter probably resembled (although it is in all likelihood a different, new species).

Also just trying out dinosaurs with eyelashes. I'm sure at least some groups had them.

 

Popped on over to the Idaho Museum of Natural History and thought I'd change it up a bit and attempt a mammal! They have two great mounts of Smilodon fatalis, a.k.a. the saber-toothed precious pumpkin. 

I get really tired of paleoart that depicts felids as soulless killing machines and wanted to draw a Smilodon looking rather approachable. If my cat and I can be besties, why not? :) (If Smilodon was anything like modern cats, it would warm up to you real quick if it learned you were a source of free food and belly rubs.)

I don't draw prehistoric mammals as often as other animal groups, especially Pleistocene mammals, because they're not very far removed from modern fauna, so I get more worried about how closely I can get them to resemble their extant cousins, and we know perfectly well what those look like. With stuff like dinosaurs or Cambrian stem-arthropods, I feel like I have a bit more wiggle room. 

I think that's part of why I find paleoart so fun, because there's actually a good deal of creature design involved; rather than drafting illustrations of something you can get photographic (or in-person) reference for, with paleoart you're given a skeleton or a carapace and you get to use your (scientifically-informed) imagination to reconstruct the rest of the animal.

 More sketching at the Idaho Museum of Natural History! They asked me if I would draw their new Oryctodromeus mount, which has updated physiology based on new research. Most noticeable are the shorter legs and much longer tail, but it also seems to have a proportionately larger head. You can see the difference between this and previous drawings based on the older interpretation. 

You can check out the relevant paper here.

 

Here's some old Cambrian fan art! <3 (Is it fan art or paleoart when you're doodling prehistoric critters just because you love them? I guess it's both.)

I liked how the Alalcomenaeus turned out so much that I made it into a painting, although I was working from some poorly preserved fossils so there's a lot wrong with the anatomy (missing great appendages and median eyes, telson is the wrong shape entirely, etc.). This is an extremely speculative reconstruction that definitely crosses the line into fanciful, but I just really liked the idea of a megacheiran with an iridescent carapace and brine shrimp-like feathery gills. You never know, it could have happened.

I've been rather busy lately, but I was finally able to get back to the Idaho Museum of Natural History for more paleo doodling!

They've got a great cast of a Prosaurolophus skull, and I figured I needed more hadrosaurs in my life. I also wanted to illustrate a hadrosaur showing some of the more recent discoveries about this group's anatomy, such as the ridge along its back and a soft-tissue crest. Also important is the fact that hadrosaurs had a keratinized rhamphotheca (i.e. a beak) which allowed them to crop off bites of the tough vegetation that made up their diet. Any paleoart you see with a hadrosaur having a flat, kinda flabby-looking duck bill is inaccurate. 

As a matter of fact (and I am aware this is purely personal opinion and most people don't care), it gets on my nerves when hadrosaurs are called "duck-billed" dinosaurs because in life, the front of their mouths would have more resembled a turtle beak. "Duck-bill" also conjures images of these guys wading through swamps and scooping up mushy plants, when it has been known for decades that they were fully terrestrial and ate conifers and the like. It's an inaccurate and outmoded nickname and I really think it's got to go.

Anyway, that's just me being pedantic. Again.

 Lately I've been musing about how cats are basically mammalian dromaeosaurs who figured out how to make all of their claws extendable, and then I just had to draw that.

Honestly I think cats and dromaeosaurs are really good analogues; they have similar ecological niches as small-to-mid-size hypercarnivores, and dromaeosaurs probably had a similar level of intelligence as cats (i.e. diabolical geniuses).

Of course, that means the logical conclusion is that they'd make great pets.

 

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.

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.

Wishing everyone a blessed and joyful Christmas, a wonderful holiday season, and a good year ahead!

Featured dinos are Pachyrhinosaurus and an unnamed troodontid from the Prince Creek Formation in northern Alaska. Even back in the balmy Cretaceous, those polar regions could get a bit chilly in winter!

By the way, I have an announcement to share soon, so keep an eye out for some news coming in the next few days!

 

Another sketch from the Idaho Museum of Natural History! Went for a portrait view of Oryctodromeus this time.

Had another sketching day at the Idaho Museum of Natural History! Here's Oryctodromeus, Idaho's state dinosaur, and interestingly enough the only (currently) named dinosaur from Idaho. Quite a few dinosaur remains have been found in the Wayan Formation of eastern Idaho, but they're mostly so fragmentary that not enough material has been found yet to establish any new species. Except for the oryctos which were evidently everywhere.

Oryctodromeus means "digging runner", and most illustrations show their burrowing habits, so I thought I'd draw one living up to the other half of its name and running! They actually had rather long tails that this illustration doesn't do justice, but I ran out of room on the paper.