I Love Harvest Mice. They Are So Small, And One Of The Only Rodents To Have A Prehensile Tail. Very Cool

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Pssst... something new is coming...

...this weekend!

Free, non-AI animal art references.

Solar Eclipse Shadows

These solar eclipse shadows form due to the distance between the sun and the leaves on the trees. The distance and the proximity of the leaves to one another cause for a "lensing" type effect, making the eclipse shadow clearer to the human eye.

The feel of toothless here is so unique. The shark like ridges to reduce drag is such a smart idea. Personally I think the live action redesign could have benefit from concepts like that. Real life elements and adaptations might have aided in grounding the dragons in realism and helped them fit in next to the actors.

All the dragons from the HTTYD stream. Detailed images below.

The designs from the original movie are basically perfect, which is why I didn't really dare to touch them... until a certain trailer dropped recently.

I'm a spiteful creature.

Anyway. Some ground rules. I tried to make these creatures overall a little bit more realistic and grounded without robbing them of the inherent whimsy that the originals had. All of them are tetrapods, so only 4 limbs max.

Nightfury

These guys have no more functional limbs to move on the ground. They are living stealth bombers. Silent fast fliers.

On the ground they flop around similar to seals, forming small colonies on top of tall cliffs.

Red Death

At a certain size it becomes unfeasible to fly for even a dragon. The Red Death stays on the ground using it's heavy armor and enormous size when raiding other dragon nesting colonies. it'as wings are more like spurs, to injure rivals in combat.

Gronkle

The original had a hummingbird style in flying , something that doesn't work for an animal of this size. My compromise is to make the wings rather stout and being able to be folded a lot.

Nadder

Easiest design, take a unfeathered theropod and combine it with a bearded dragon.

Shellfire

This was the last one I made on stream, it is one of the (in my eyes) worst designs from the shows, so a nice challenge to make it work a little better.

This guy is now a filter feeder, using its large horns to funnel water into its mouth.

Zippleback

Multi-headed dragons are really tricky. In my design I made one of the heads a parasitic male, similar to angler fish, that hitches a ride on the back of the larger female.

Monstrous Nightmare

One of the most classic dragons from the original movie. Lots of crocodilian influence here. The osteoderms on its back have pores from which it produces flammable secretions.

Razorwhip

A fast an agile dragon, but the original doesn't really show that in the head shape and all these spines don't help. I put some tapejarid influence into it.

Rumblehorn

The massive neck of this dragon doesn't work well in terms of aerodynamics, unless it's an inflatable display structure ;)

Whispering Death

The giant maw of this dragon is an even greater challenge, but when you give it the gular pouch of a pelican eel and turn these eyes into eye-spots, it works quite well.

And of course the Terrible Terror!

As you can see it's in my case a close relative of the nadder.

They kept anthropomorphizing him more and more as the series went on. This tends to happen a lot with creatures in animation. It is honestly what happened with Sisu in Raya and the last Dragon I’m pretty sure. The initial concepts of the character /creature are created with a lot of distinct features that make the characters stand out. Then as the production continues, many more hands,(artists, modellers, riggers, texture artists, animators, etc.), all touch on and tweak the design and how the character moves. Some things get improved, some things get eroded away.

Not to mention the art direction and goals for what they wanted the dragons to look like changed from the first movie to the third. The first ones all feel more natural like you could see which dragons were related to each other and they blended in to where they lived. Most of the cast had dappled greens, yellows, and browns. They also had some display adaptations like the deadly nadder’s quill/spikes being a bright yellow against its blue scales, forming several ring display patterns to warn other animals that its tail is dangerous.

Those types of details were not as important to them as the series went on. I think they wanted to make each dragon distinct from the rest and instead favoured certain design trends or gave a dragon one really big distinct feature. Think the antlers on the Crimson Goregutter or how all the design features of the Deathgripper look like they are from either a scorpion or a whip spider. I don’t think they were spending as much time trying to blend these features together in a more natural sort of way. I don’t think that was there goal any more. Plus they probably didn’t have as much time to workshop the designs as they did the first movie.

speaking of how to train your dragon and creature design, the shift from the really naturalistic art direction and character animation for the first movie's toothless- the face getting flatter, the eyes bigger and closer together, getting rid of the little realistic details like the dust collecting between the scales, the pink splotching where the scales end at the nostrils, the muted markings, the animation making a shift from largely realistic animal behavior to much more anthropomorphic- is such a huge downgrade to me, made worse because it's subtle in such a way that you will sound insane if you mention it

(huge L for the "the audience's capacity to find a creature cute and empathetic and expressive is directly proportional to how much it looks like a human baby" principle of character design because the first one is so so much cuter)

Guillermo Galetti, an Argentine Artist, Transforms Scrap Metal Into Unique Sculpture

A scavenger toll that is part of my little Rain World set.

this was my favorite drawing from 2022. I re-sketched one of them just to see how far I improve (my sketches are always messy though, so idk if y'all can see the differences jdsksj)

ALSO. this was inspired by his fight compilation that I compiled a while back

youtube link

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originally posted October 19, 2022

Amazing work!

We are approaching the maximum of images you can post here so I thought it was time I make a little showcase of all the formation pieces we covered so far on the streams.

For people who don't know: for several months now I draw one formation or fossil locality every Saturday. The next place we visit is chosen by a wheel of names, which we also constantly fill up again when a new formation is picked.

I try to make it as interesting as possible in my composition and choice of animals and I can tell you this series has been a great training when it comes to constructing these, how I call them, Menageries.

I have to thank a team of friends and colleagues who help behind the scenes with research, creation of size charts and conversation partners when it comes to deciding on the compositions of these pieces. Their help has been invaluable!

my rw sona/oc first drawing is inspired by kociamieta's five pebbles art