SWAN 🦢 ✈️  (Strategic Wyvern Aerial Navigator)

Drawing a face is one thing, but making a head look 3-dimensional is another challenge. The solution? Planes ✈️ Here are some of my thoughts on that!

This is a preview of my tutorial on drawing the planes of the face - check it out on my Patreon!

Fontainebleau State Park, Mandeville, Louisiana by Lana Gramlich

Love these little guys.

Why not. Sharing the old and grumpy dwarf kula from Neal's favorite garden.

It likes to pretend it's intimidating but it still eats anything Neal offers it. Just needs enough personal space.

he calls it Gnome (not in english tho)

he really wants to be friends

Awesome stop motion. Very inspired.

A look behind my little animation.

I don’t have a lot of space at the moment so I can only manage to do short one session animations. Hopefully in the future, I can do some longer form ones.

Their shapes and colours are so creative!

Styraphant ethnicity BIG POST! Basically just going over the main 'flavors' that all styraphants kind of fall into. More detail below the cut!

They can all interbreed and are the same species, but have a lot more genetic variation than human populations on Earth! There are about 6 main 'morphs', but that being said individuals with varied lineages may be a little hard to pin down. When in doubt the shape of ones crest is where most will look when trying to assume! Because that IS where most of the variation resides. Big list inbound.

Star. These are the dudes I've been drawin so far. They tend to inhabit around the center of their planets largest continent, in the more tropical zones. So like to live in wooded areas and lush vegetation.

Flame. These guys are named for the upswept tines on their crest. They are the most Northernly, enjoying mostly temperate climates and migrating as the seasons change to avoid chillier weather.

Fan. These guys are FUN. With large webbed tines on the crests of both males and females. They are darker due to their hot, arid home, so typically built to avoid sunburn.

Scallop. These guys are named because the edges of their crested are, in fact, scalloped. They range from temperate to tropical climates, tending to stick to places on the soggier side.

Disk. These guys have completely smooth crests! They are also the smallest variety, mostly due to their more seaborne nature. They have the widest range of climates and tend to move around the most by a wide margin.

Spade. These have a spade shaped face, obviously, with two large tines pointing directly upward. They are found in the colder, Southern continent, the only variety not found on the mainland. Their thickset frame helps them put up with the cold year round.

This is the gist! They cover a wide variety of crest and body type in these groups as they are pretty different!

Most differences come from the different regions each population has settled in as I'm also thinking that they are an older species. So they've had time to become more sculpted by their environments. They get along pretty well though, like I'm thinking it's odd to not associate with each other!

Can’t wait! This is going to be amazing!

The Kickstarter for 'Other Worlds', my first ever book, is GO!

Filled with art from Subnautica: Below Zero, the Birrin Saga, and decades of my illustration and concept art.

I took no half-measures creating this book.

The Kickstarter link is here!

Solar eclipse shadows

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)

Beautiful feather texture!

One of my favorite birds is the bittern and one of my favourite dinosaurs is troodon! That's why I combined them into one! By giving this prehistoric creature a marking inspired by this wonderful bird.