One of these days I’ll learn how to draw dinosaurs, or at least practice, but for now we’ll settle for disembodied, out-of-proportion heads that resemble dinosaurs more than they resemble other things. Actually, they’re not meant to be dinosaurs at all, they’re meant to be a sort of intelligent dinosaur-bird-alien dude who starred in a book I never wrote for NaNoWriMo one year. I mean, I finished the NaNo and all, but I never went back to proofread and I’m not 100% sure I even finished the story.
But anyhow, the basic gist of it (some of which was actually included in the story itself, some of which I just sort of assumed, implied, or thought of afterward) was that he’s the extraterrestrial equivalent of a slightly larger Velociraptor/Troodon type theropod, in which the males have a decorative crest and (as with modern raptors) are rather smaller than females. The females might have less contrast and color in their markings and be of an overall sturdier build, without the showy head ornamentation — like lionesses, they might traditionally be the hunters in a group. Suffice to say, our friend finds human gender differences a little counterintuitive and doesn’t always guess correctly.
My first try for his species/race/tribe/what-have-you was simple bold markings in black and white, focused on the face and underparts, like you might see in flocking seabirds or orca whales; I may transfer this over to his coastal neighbors, though, and give him something from the desert parrot palette instead. I definitely want a splash of red somewhere. I like red.
I also feel as if I’ve probably described some part of this somewhere in the past of this blog, which is one of the dangers of having an increasingly large number of posts. No worries, though — if I don’t remember, I’m counting on no one who’s stuck with my blog this long remembering either.
Drawn @ Random 