ART PARTY!

Alright folks! I've been drawing a lot lately... check it out.

First up, its DINOSAUR CAVE ART WITH NEMO RAMJET! 

Next up, adventures with the world's smallest hominids!

More later.

Sketch/Script

One of the sketch/script pages that preceded the second scene of "Jan's Atomic Heart". 

A picture for the inner covers of the book. I dunno how I feel about it. I think I kind of mucked up the lower right in the wreckage there.

RAISE THAT ROOF!

For the motherland!

A t-shirt graphic for the UVic russian club - a lot of fun to do.

Jan's Atomic Heart

AWW YEAH BOYS! Peep it:

POST UP ON THE PUBLISHER'S SITE FOR MY COMIC!

oh, and if y'got facebook, invite yourself to this.

Evolution of an idea...

So, late last August, I had just moved to Calgary. I had gone to Drumheller with my family that same month, home to the Royal Tyrell Museum, the pre-eminent Paleontological museum in western Canada, as far as I know. Now, most of my friends had gone to Drumheller at some point in their childhood - for whatever reason, I hadn't. Our family had a bunch of other great trips, but never to Drumheller. So when I went there, deeply suppressed feelings of paleo-wonder swept over me. I had never exorcised those prehistoric demons from my little-boy subconscious, and they began to nag at me. In early september, playing around with pen and ink, it started. I began to draw lizard-men, vaguely dinosaurian in appearance. Oh, how innocent it was. I hadn't even thought of evolutionary history or encephalization quotients yet...

Then I ran into Darren Naish and Nemo Ramjet in my journeys for a better dinosauroid. The full experience can be found at this post here, but needless to say, the seed was planted. I began to try to put together a more realistic intelligent therapod dinosaur. These following images are two of the very first corvid-like dinosauroids I drew.


The body plan was slowly changed and refined, but I simply ran out of steam. It was looking like the end result would just be a hooded crow with a deinonychosaurid tail and sereima's feet - not quite what I had been looking for. It all came to a head in december, where I flushed my system of dinosaurian thoughts with the construction of a feathered, three dimensional troodontid sculpture. I thought it was over.




But it wasn't. At the beginning of February, it all started again. After a week or two fiddling around with evolutionary history, I found a beast that I could be proud of. After a bit of chatting with the illustrious Nemo Ramjet (whose site is down right now, but when it resurrects itself, it's REALLY worth a look), I decided to dive in head-first (conceptually), and start working on developing a culture.

The results can be seen here, at my deviantart account. So here's the question:


WHAT in the FUCK am I going to do with this world once I've created it?

A comic, maybe?

Super-Seal in USA and Puerto Rico - All rights reserved

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The front of the wrap-around cover for "Jan's Atomic Heart", formerly "Morning Coffee with Jan and Anders". The text will be different, but this is basically it.

ROCK (the fuck) ON!

The Themesong...?

Oh yeah...

Oh, and here's the various rough covers for the comic. For marketing purposes, the name's been changed back to it's initial title - Jan's Atomic Heart. The top design will be the one you'll see on shelves, though. It'll be in trade size, too, instead of a small indie-style book.


Rock on.

AWWW YEAH! KNAP THAT FLINT!

I had the uncomfortable realization that having such limited tools of manipulation on my speculative animal would make a bit of a boring material culture. So, in the interest of trying to still pretend that I'm being scientific, the dinosauroid has forelimbs of increased but still limited dexterity. Evolutionarily, the dinosauroid's ancestors would need to be at least partially arboreal - maybe scavengers of the forest floor, nesting and occasionally hunting in the lower levels of the forest canopy. There is a species of dromaeosaur on the fossil record (named hilariously enough "bambiraptor") who did have an opposable thumb, of a sort. Now, of course, there is no real way to know a fossil animal's ecology - but they figure that bambiraptor was probably an arboreal hunter, using it's opposable fingers to snatch up fat insects and little tree-dwelling mammals. It's nice to have an actual case of dinosaurs with dextrous forepaws - it makes what I'm doing a little less of a stretch.

In terms of visual culture, I'm starting with this design - a war mask/helmet/fighting beak - suggested by the illustrious Nemo Ramjet. I'm heavily cribbing from Meso-american cultures with this one, using obsidian blades set into the fighting edges of the mask, much like an aztec sword or spear. I'll start doing more development of dinosaurian material culture - clothes, architecture, etc - soon enough.

The previous direction I was going I like, but was quite materially uninteresting. Without more dextrous hands, I would have been stuck with a dinosaur whose only technology was this:

...which I still think is sweet. I just wanted to have more (and crazier) shit to draw, which takes this from a scientific approach to a more fantastic one.

Is that so selfish?