Creature Anatomy - Week 5

Studies and designs for week 5 of of creature anatomy. Week 5 focused on ungulates.  

 

Creature Anatomy - Week 4

Week 4 of my creature anatomy course focused on feline and canine anatomy.  We had the option of doing a canine dinosaur hybrid creature or a feline bird hybrid creature.  I went with the cat bird since feline anatomy is less familiar to me.  The influences for the creature came from mountain lions and harpy eagles.  It also has a tiny bit of microraptor in there with the hind limb having well developed flight feathers. 

Creature Anatomy - Week 3

My sketches and designs for week 3 of the creature anatomy course I'm in.  Week 3 focused on bird and dinosaur anatomy.  I decided to combine owl anatomy and the anatomy of abelisaurs for my creature.  Below you can see a few of the studies I did of owls and various abelisaurs along with final design.

Creature Anatomy - Week 2

This is some of the work I did for the second week of the creature anatomy course I’m taking. Week two was focused on fish, amphibian and reptile anatomy.

I didn’t really have a strong idea for the creature I wanted to design initially so I started to research and explore the animal groups with the hope that during my studying something would spark an Idea.  I focused my attention on fish anatomy first since it’s the area I had the least experience with.  I did my first studies on a few extant species that I could easily find reference for.  I also kept my eye out for anything that caught my attention and might make a good base for a creature.  The goliath tiger fish was one of these.  I really love the big teeth and the sharply curved fins.
 

I also did a couple pages of extinct species.  Here are a some studies featuring the ancient lobe finned fish eusthenopteron and and early amphibian capitosaurus. 

After doing a bunch of studies I did finally settle on an idea for my creature and began another round of sketches this time focusing specifically on those species I wanted to incorporate into my design

I wanted the final creature design to incorporate elements form all three animal groups.  I also wanted to push the story telling in the design, so I spent some time writing a brief natural history for the creature.  I wanted it to be like something you might see in a field guide, just a quick summary explaining a bit about the world it comes from and some details regarding its behavior.  I wish I had time to get a color version and some additional studies of the creature finished. If I can I want to revisit it sometime in the future to flesh things out even more.
 

Creature Anatomy

I've been taking a course on creature anatomy and design for the past few weeks. It's been keeping me pretty busy.  The class is being taught by Terryl Whitlatch and focuses heavily on observing and learning the anatomy of existing animals. This knowledge is applied to creatures constructed from imagination. These are some of the sketches and studies I did for the first week of the course.  

We started with human anatomy as a base. It's been a while since I've studied any human anatomy so I was definitely feeling rusty. I chose to draw the character in a crawling position to make comparisons between the human and animal anatomy easier. 

We started to familiarize ourselves with animal anatomy by designing a basic quadrupedal creature.  We were able to use any tetrapod as a basis for the design, but I didn't want to get ahead by using any of the animal groups we'd be covering in future lessons. I decided to combine features from primitive mammals and reptiles.  The end result has a strong resemblance to prehistoric synapsids/therapsids.  After realizing this I went ahead an incorporated some characteristics from those groups as well.   

We moved on to a hybrid creature that combined human anatomy and a quadruped of our choice. I had a hard time narrowing down my selection, but I finally chose to use a spotted hyena to create a human hyena hybrid.  Below you can see some examples of the reference sheets I create with Kuadro, a very simple program I use to manage a lot of my reference images.  These are just a couple I created from images I've been collecting online.  I also used several human and animal anatomy books I keep in my library at home. 

I'll try and post up as many of my studies and designs from the course as I can .  I've only been in the class for a couple of weeks and I've already accumulated a lot of them.  However, preparations for CTN are beginning to pick up so finding time to process all of these sketches and post them is becoming a challenge.