Marine Iguanas

Studies of Marine Iguanas from photo reference I found online.  

Copic Marker and Staedler Pigment Liner on sketchbook paper

Bird Skulls

A few pages of bird skull studies.  These are done from photos reference in a book of mine called
Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley's Curious Collection.  It's probably one of my favorite animal anatomy books.

Cachet Earthbound Recycled Sketchbook Paper
Copic Warm Grey Sketch Markers: C1, C3, C5, C7 
Copic Multi Liners: 03, 07
White Gelly Roll Gel Pen
White Prismacolor Colored Pencil

Insect Studies

A few studies from photo reference using a new quick sketching technique I learned.  The insects are from a cool little book I found over at Barnes and Noble Called 500 Insects: A Visual Reference by Stephen Marshall.  It's a cool little book with tons of great close up photos of a wide variety of bugs.  Definitely a nice quick reference for anyone looking to study insects or create a design based on insect anatomy.

Cachet Earthbound Recycled Sketchbook Paper
Copic Warm Grey Sketch Markers: C1, C3, C5, C7
Copic Multi Liners: 03, 07
White Gelly Roll Gel Pen

Royal Scythe Update

 

Spent some more time developing the Scythe creature.  Progress on this guy was interrupted unexpectedly due to illness.  I'm feeling a lot better now, and I'm excited to be able to work on this design again. 

I've spent a few more hours refining a few areas.  I been focusing a lot of my effort on the head and beak area, as well as trying to figure out the overall anatomy.  I've also added the antenna-like structures on its torso and adjusted the proportion and posing of its feet a bit. The rest has just been adding detail to the rendering.

Artwork © Raul Ramos All Rights Reserved 

Royal Scythe

 

 

This a is a creature Design for CG Hubs Creature Forge Challenge # 69 The Royal Scythe.  The creature design prompt calls for an animal with a long scythe shaped beak from which it gets its name. It's supposed to be a very elegant and beautiful creature with striking color that spends its time sun bathing and using its long beak to fetch prey from crevasses and cracks in it's environment.  

What I've posted here is the reference sheet I composed and the initial gray scale sketch I created for the creature. As you can probably see from my ref sheet the Scythe has the general posture and anatomy of various flightless birds.  I've taken inspiration from hadrosaurs to flesh out the shape of its head, and the sail from an odd therapod called Concavenator to figure out the structure of the fin on its back. 

The creature was one of the few and rare instances where the visual component of the of the design was very clear and well developed in my mind before I began to sketch, for which I'm thankful. There are still a lot of things to figure out, but I'm having a lot of fun with this guy.  Hope to post more soon.

 1.5 hrs
Adobe Photoshop CS5, Intuos 4 Tablet  
Artwork © Raul Ramos All Rights Reserved