More dinos.

I swear, this shit is an unhealthy addiction. I just can't stop myself....

I've put up a shirt design at threadless.com, so we'll see what happens there.

New cover!

I've got a new cover up for "Morning Coffee with Jan and Anders". I'm pretty pumped on the tone, though the poorly-rendered space elevator in the background has to go...

FORGET K-T

I'm putting all the drawings I'm doing on this dinosaur obsession into this set on flickr. 

DINOSAUROIDS! (biggest post ever)

(above picture from this guy's photostream)

Okay. So back in 1982, one of Canada’s greatest paleantologists, Dale Russell, conducted a thought experiment. The idea had been thrown around before, but Ol’ Dale took it to the next level. What if the age of the dinosaurs had not ended with an asteroid in the late creataceous, but had kept going? Would it be ridiculous to posit that intelligent life would develop?

So, with that in mind, Dale grabbed Ron Séguin, taxidermist and artist, and had him make two models. One of Troodon, a maniraptoran dino who appears to have one of the largest brains of any known dinosaur - aka the intelligence of an equivalently sized flightless bird - and one model of what Troodon perhaps would have evolved into. Thus, the dinosauroid, a dinosaur hominid, was born. The eyes grew larger and more binocular, the head larger to accommodate the brain, and the body upright to support the big brain.

However, plenty of people thought that this was arrogant at best, and ridiculous at worst. Why would a non-avian dinosaur abandon its horizontal form in favour of a body type so specific to mammalian primates?

So here’s where I pick it up. I read a post by Darren Naish, a great paleontologist from the UK, about some of his thoughts on the matter. After visiting the Tet Zoo and looking at the Hornbills there, his reflections ended in this interesting conclusion: 

“Of course you don’t need to compare ground hornbills with Cretaceous predatory dinosaurs, or with hominids or other primates, to make them interesting. But I can’t help coming back to Russell & Séguin’s ‘dinosauroid’ hypothesis. No, post-Cretaceous maniraptorans wouldn’t end up looking like scaly tridactyl plantigrade humanoids with erect tailless bodies. They would be decked out with feathers and brightly coloured skin ornaments; have nice normal horizontal bodies and digitigrade feet; long, hard, powerful jaws; stride around on the savannah kicking the shit out of little mammals; and in the evenings they would stand together in the trees, booming out a duet of du du du-du, a deep noise that would reverberate for miles around.”

Inspired by this, the Turkish artist “Nemo Ramjet” came up with this design.

(The coolest thing about this design is that he also made a series of cave paintings, using spit and charcoal (etc) and his mouth to hold the brushes he made.)

Intrigued by all this, I started to look into avian intelligence, and came upon something pretty fucking cool. It turns out that crows - most specifically, the New Caledonian Crow - have been found to be at least as clever as the great apes. Moreover, these little bastards are as good at tool use as the chimps - and they only have beaks and feet to work with! The clever dinosauroids these fellows have been talking about already exist - and they're eating our garbage, luckily, instead of killing us off and conquering the world. (update - after more reading, it seems that they can learn all types of advanced behaviour - an evolutionary psychologist in Israel witnessed a hooded crow successfully bait-fish using torn off pieces of bread - cool, huh?)

That being said, instead of being discouraged to find that evolution had beaten me to the punch, I’ve been basing the intelligent dinos I’ve been drawing on the corvids, and their tool use on the tool use of the new Caledonian crow. These are the nicer drawings I’ve been doing…

 

(There are some rougher sketches, but not many are as nice)

Now, in conclusion, the idea of intelligent crow-raptors learning to fish may not be as exciting as green scaly men - but green scaly men are cliché and look fucking dumb.

PEACE OUT.

What I've been drawing lately...

Aside from the comic, I've been drawing these little fellas - lizard men from the stone age.

Also, I've posted up a few more pages for the comic.

COMICS, DOGG!

AW YEAH TWENTY-FOUR PAGES UP FO YOUR PLEASURE!

russian dog men?

The seed of some really metaphorical-type shit coming down the pipe.

So LOOKOUT!

Pronounced "Yann"

The first two pages of "Morning Coffee with Jan and Anders", also known as "Jan's Atomic Heart". I've only done 22 pages so far, and I've only had the time to scan these two, so THIS IS ALL YOU'RE GETTING YOU GREEDY PIGS!

A love of robots... number 2.

Okay, so I lied about putting stuff up "tomorrow". But here's some spider tanks, finally. I'm a big fan of the Japanese "Ghost in the Shell" movie/manga/tv series, and was inspired to draw some big spider-robots of my own. Here's a few, probably also from around 2004-ish. (Give or take a year. )

A love of robots... number 1b.

I wanted to show off a few more drawings of these walkers, because obviously my fourteen-year-old self thought them to be so awesome that fully rendering them was far more important than finishing any other part of the story or page.

And what is a giant killing machine good for, if not killing?

Tomorrow: Spider-robot-tanks!

A love of robots... number 1.

Since a sweet, tender age, I've been fascinated by the idea of robots and robotics. In this magnificent retrospective, I'll be rooting through the archives of the Robotblood offices to show off various designs that I have stolen, derived, and otherwise "invented" over the past years.

This walking machine was part of an abortive project that really revolved more around a magnificent setting I had devised rather then an actual story. It was drawn in 2004, and I think the general idea was that the soviets had invaded and occupied western Europe. The setting of the story was france, probably around 2025-2030 AD. This was a war machine of the Soviet occupying force, labeled as such by the prominent cyrillic "GB" (standing for "state security" - "Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti") on the side of the pilot's compartment. While being heavily cribbed from the game Oni, this is still one of my favourite robots.

MORE TOMORROW!