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Monday, November 24th, 2008
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Flickr is becoming better and better as a source of good animal photos, there are so many photos that now even an odd search like "ostrich feet" returns lots of useful results.
Unluckily it requires registration to get the full size images, and it is necessary to use Firefox + Adblock to get rid of the annoying "protection" which normally prevents from downloading images, but now it is worth it. Also needed is the Greasemonkey extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/748 ) to have access to this life-saving script, which displays on the normal Flickr pages a direct link to the largest size of the image if it is available, so it is possible to download the hi-res picture with a single click:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/Flickr/
Apparently this script also works on Safari.
Some pictures which show well the overall structure:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27843137@N00/2553556537/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/72194456@N00/337945966/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayjummac/81015973/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22204867@N08/2138289629/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40726390@N00/135328023/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreybuot/2192046245/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/copleys/434905305/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jemby/204058932/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkhairedgirl/2098488445/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iansavage/421446805/
<3
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cropwithanna/2057659717/
Full leg with tendons well visible:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/penglynns/2664785235/
It's amazing how most of the red stuff here is just bone and tendons with skin wrapped around them. Almost no muscles. The big muscles which move the ostrich's leg are nearly one meter far from the fingers they move - the largest muscles are extensors and flexors of the fingers. Yet they have some of the most powerful legs among large animals, even able to kill a predator or a human with one kick... this is due to their tendons which are are very efficient at storing and releasing elastic energy.
Also impressive is the fact the "heel" (actually it's the massive joint between the tarsus and the first phalanges) never actually touch the ground. The ostrich is basically mounted onto huge, permanently tense springs. :-) I wonder if there are similarities with the kangaroo feet, even though their gait is very different.
Just cute ^_^
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nao-cha/410918802/
How can this be considered ugly? :-<
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dee_gee/118376039/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10089490@N06/2991659912/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamhphoto/2586742567/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24984201@N00/2941538103/
These are the best images I've ever seen of lobate feet, it's one of the fundamental types of bird feet, used to walk on swampland.
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Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, September 18th, 2008
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Thursday, September 11th, 2008
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I should really use this blog more. Since I like to do a lot of planning for pictures I guess I can show WIPs more often, and going a bit more indeep on the things I'm learning and trying along the way.
So I'll start with one of the pictures I'm currently working on. I have drawn a lot of birds lately, mostly because of the book "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils" and the documentaries of the series "The Life of Birds". Either of them is beautiful enough to make anybody fall in love with birds, but if you are exposed to both in the same period, you are doomed... they will make you grow feathers.
( Several images NSFW! )
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Monday, January 7th, 2008
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
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Friday, December 7th, 2007
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Monday, December 3rd, 2007
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Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
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I have heard very mixed reactions to this, but I think that it was a rightful choice even if my justification has probably nothing to do with the jury's.
( Plot spoilers ahead )
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Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, February 26th, 2007
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( This is a puffin trying to save a horribly drawn human girl after a bad dive too near to some rocks... )
( This is a working class puffin at work in the market. )
Yeah, that's clichè work for a puffin, but then most people don't do original works. :-] I definitely need to finalize some of these pictures with humans now or I will never ever learn to draw them...
( This is a depressed puffin. )
Absolutely NSFW.
I was just thinking that many old school furry stories were sympathetic to anthros exploited as sex slaves and dealt with themes such as liberation, becoming dignified creatures, etc. The concept of "furry liberation" was the fandom's badge of honor, actually. But now the furry fandom mostly accepts without problem the exploiting of anthros for porn and is mostly based upon it.
I know that in current western culture self-humiliation on the media is actually a way to gain sympathy and maybe even something similar to respect, but nevertheless something feels amiss. We have met the enemy, and he is really us...
( And this is a baby puffin, about 3-4 years old. )
The are excellent swimmers. In fact they swim better and faster than adults since their wings develop faster than the body. They also develop swimming and catching instinct at a very early age, so a baby puffin has decent chances of surviving alone in the wild if there is open water nearby. The wing reach their final size about at the age of sexual maturity, around 13.
Fast developing wings also force babies to use a lot their pectoral muscles, thus developing them well without too much specific training required.
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Comments: Read 11 or Add Your Own.
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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
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Saturday, January 13th, 2007
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A new WIP, this time gouache. Maybe horse-taurs don't have to be "stiff" and specialized like horses, I thought they could be a bit more flexible.
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_happy_days_sk01.jpg
Sorry for the really poor looking scan, I could'nt make it any better than this for now. Ochre and sienna and blue over brown paper seems to confuse a lot the scanner. The blue is not a scanning artifact though, I've actually used it for the shadows.
I am now working on a couple commissions too, one for a painting which I've begun already and another with other taurs...
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Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.
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Monday, January 1st, 2007
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Some time ago I have seen the beautyful documentary series "The life of Birds" by David Attenborough and episode 4 made me notice that birds can actually be very good swimmers. I had never thought that morphs adapted for swimming and water life might be designed taking ideas from sea birds rather than cetaceans and fishes, but after seeing the swimming skills of cormorants, puffins and penguins I think that wing-propelled swimming could be the best option for a creature with humanoid legs. I'm now designing anthro puffins, a species more or less like this:
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_angelica01.jpg
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_warming_up_sk.jpg
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_attenboroughs_puffin_sk01.jpg
Emperor penguins are as large as a small human and can swim pretty fast. Not quite as fast as a dolphin, but an anthro dolphin with legs in the way of his tail would probably be slower and less agile anyway. Dolphins and fishes achieve their speed thanks to their very specific body shape and the flux of water around it and dolphins in particular rely on reducing turbulence to the absolute minimum to achieve their very high speed with minimal effort; their body shape and even their skin structure is adapted for that goal. They swim mostly by vertical movement of the tail.
For now I'm not thinking much about senses, only of the basic and external anatomy. Anatomical traits I would like for an anthro creature designed for water:
1) In general: better swimming skills, while being naked and not especially trained, than a trained human with fins and scuba gear. Else it wouldn't probably be worth the effort. She should be able to live a sea creature's life without any equipment or technology.
2) Either organs for breathing underwater or very good adaptations for holding breath for a long time.
3) Ability to walk and move decently on the surface.
4) Having a good top speed, probably a dolphin's speed is impossible to achieve but she should be able to catch fishes with teeth/beak, to make fast turns and to have some pretty good speed bursts, the latter two are things that a swimming human cannot do easily.
5) Energy-savy body and good endurance. They should be able to swim everyday for a long distance with a relaxed pace and saving energy.
6) Good thermal regulation ability in cold water. It is a complex problem because a big brain like a human's or cetacean's produces a lot of heat and there are blood cooling needs as well as insulation needs depending on the body part. But in general all the thicker parts of the body (head, torso, abdomen etc.) should be well insulated.
Some problems of the "classic" anthro cetaceans I've seen and drawn so far (like in http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/2004/s_haven.html ) with the above points:
1) Assuming he has legs with webbed feet:
- He could have legs which move up and down along with the tail seconding its movement. But this is weirdly redundant while the simpler solution (only the tail) works really well on most animals. The base of the tail has to be very muscular and thick, and legs need to be muscular as well in order to be useful for walking, so it seems hard to make all the needed muscles fit. Not counting the extra thickness required by insulating fat.
- He could keep the legs more or less motionless in some position which doesn't disrupt the tail's movement. But the tail needs to move a lot in order to give a good push, so the legs would probably be in a position where they increase resistance to the water flux.
- Ho could have some unusual leg structure so the legs are placed on the side of the body and can be used like the feet of diving birds (cormorants etc.) as a secondary swimming device. The tail would be the main propeller and the legs would serve for manoeuvering and for a small extra pus without getting in its way. But diving birds are all quite goofy on the ground and such legs wouldn't probably be very good for walking.
2) Cetaceans are very good at this. The blowhole on the top of the head is not perfect for being on the ground though, it is exposed to things falling from above, which is not good and can be awkward in many cases. Artist APIS has shown a blowhole in a different position, which is interesting but probably not much fit for fast emersion and breating the cetacean way:
http://us-p.vclart.net/vcl/Artists/APIS/gnawty/pod.jpg
The back of the head could be a better position for breating (by Mike T.):
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/278196/
Yet it is hard to reach with hands and this can be dangerous, and I think it is not easy to design a good neck with such a setup. For now I don't have better ideas yet.
3) Related to 1. Is a large dolphinlike tail good when you need to work in a office? Take the bus? Sit on a human made chair? Use a toilet made for humans? Run fast? Climb a ladder? Do a complex manual work like carpentry or masonry? Probably not. I like such tails and I'm giving it to my Elysius gryphons for now but maybe it is not such a good things.
4-5) It is very hard to do comparisons because cetaceans and humans swim in very different ways, and figuring out an intermediate model of swimming is eve harder. In general turbulence is bad and legs are going to cause turbulence with their mere presence, so basing the swimming skill on a tail movment which is further disrupted by them doesn't seem nice.
Humans are best fit for water than many other large mammals but must resort to very complex swimming techniques to minimize the waste of energy. I don't know much about professional swimming, but I'd guess correct freestyle is a good compromise between speed and energy use for a human. According to the 1991 Guinness Book of Records the longest distance covered with continuous swimming by a human was 481,5 km in a quiet river in 84 hours and 101,9 km was the top distance in a pool in 24 hours, but I couldn't find any information on the styles and equipment used for such records. Incredibly I can't even find the speed records of swimming with fins. Anyway a human's top speed is about 2,5 m/s, that is 5-7 times less than the average speed for small cetaceans:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/BarrymoreJoseph.shtml
For the above records the average speed turns out to be 1,5 m/s and 1,17 m/s, so the gap is huge even for swimmers with an exceptional endurance who probably know well how to spare energy during long swims. At this point I'd really like to know the speed and endurance records for dolphin beat swimming, but even that wouldn't give many clues on the possible efficiency of an antrho dolphin.
Penguin swimming speed is more comparable to human speed, for example a traveling (relaxed) speed of about 2 m/s and double that speed for short fish chase:
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/JFO/v058n02/p0118-p0125.pdf
During migration they travel for days at 0,7 m/s average, but this number doesn't take into account hours of resting and fishing, so probably they can keep the traveling speed for several days:
http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v100n02/p0376-p0381.pdf
So they can't keep up with cetaceans but they are almost twice as fast as humans on endurance swimming. Not bad.
6) The insulation is mostly given by fat under the skin in cetaceans. One problem is the neck. A cetacean has almost no neck and cannot bend the head, but an anthro one would definitely want to bend the head 90° so he can stand and look forward. So he'd probably get some strange "love handles" on the throat and have wrinkles in other places on the body. Not a problem by itself, but this means he must have a certain amount of loose skin around and this would be another source of turbulence. Appearently seals and penguins have less problems here because fur and feathers can conceal small wrinkles and trap air bubbles, which leaves the outmost surface of the body smooth.
Still looking for more information...
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Comments: Read 16 or Add Your Own.
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Saturday, November 11th, 2006
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Uploaded several new pictures from the last few days, inluding a couple today:
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_learning.jpg
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_guardian_of_the_house.jpg
They probably look a bit unusual. :-) I recently realized I am dependant on pencil and eraser whenever I want to do a complex picture. The fact is I actually do a lot of anatomy and perspective errors when drawing and spend a lot of time correcting them, but now the time required for corrections in my pencil pictures is really getting out of hand, and I correct so much that I feel I'm no longer being honest about my skills.
So I am going to set aside pencils for a while and experiment more with undeletable media, with no pencil sketch underneath. For example with India ink, which I haven't used in a long long time...
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Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
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It's done:
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/2006/s_meal_with_friends.html
Also updated the junk section:
- Kirins have three eyes, they are herm and they are Made in India. Well, my kirins do at least. Sticking a thirs eye on an equine muzzle doesn't look easy though.
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_kirin_sk.jpg
- Flying foxes under test.
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_crash_test_sk.jpg
- Forest foxtaurs, tree climbing enabled. :-)
http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_pics/junk/s_circle_of_life_sk02.jpg
The last idea sparked from discussions over the Stellar Foxtaurs of Bernard Doove and how they are adapted to their respective niches. I tried to design a creature which looks more or less like a foxtaur but is even more adapted for a forest environment by having all prehensile limbs. The tail is similar to the chakasa tail, with a "finger pad" for better grip, but in this case the pad runs for the entire length of the tail. In general I think they can be more adapted than a regular foxtaur in other environments too, especially in cramped ones where being good runners is not very important but having a flexible body is good, for example in cities and inside all sort of vehicles.
The underlying idea is the old gorillataur one, but these foxtaurs are much smaller than a gorilla so I looked for orangutan and babboon references.
On the ground thought they walk like gorillas, on the knuckles of their middle hands, because it looks a quite good gait. They cannot run or march as well as most canids do, but they can still reach a fair speed on short distances. They have more or less the same mass of an average human.
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Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
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Friday, September 1st, 2006
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For people willing to learn unusual and complex things this is a golden age like few others in history. I mean, before the internet how much hard it would have been for a non-biologist (and even for many biologists) to find penguin anatomy sheets?
http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-Reports/Zool-18/htm/doc.html
And what about some thylacine sheets?
http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-Reports/Zool-16/htm/doc.html
Got there from this wonderful blog:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/
The author appearently browses university and library catalogs looking for old illustrated books, among which there are often anatomy books (and many beautyful books onmany other subjects, including old fable books etc.).
As I am growing more interested in animal anatomy I find these books are invaluable. Older anatomy illustrations may not be as easy to read as modern ones, but they have some important advantages for artists:
- Illustrations were meant to be beautyful and not just schematic. Thus the authors used to portray bodies from unusual points of view and taking some (usually small) degrees of freedom in the representation. This often allowed them to show better the shape of certain body parts which are not easy to figure out basing on the standard sections illustrated in medical anatomy books. Some authors also indulged in very complex poses and compositions, especially in the oldest books:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy/da_gallery.html
- They were often shaded with great care, because no photographs were available and thus they needed to represent volumes correctly. Thus they are often a very good reference for understanding volumes.
- Since they were less schematic, they were more accurate and showed exactly what the author was seeing, rather than omitting details like lesser veins. Also I have found that they used to represent in a much more accurate way the blurring of cartilage tissue into muscles (e.g. in animal legs).
- They stress a lot compared anatomy.
Another source of excellent anatomy information are pages of university courses. For example this gallery (WARNING: gruesome dissection photos) has many high resolution photos of bones and organs of sea lions:
http://shutterbug.ucsc.edu/sealion/albums.php
On other university sites I have found things as useful as sections of dog fingers and photos of bones with superimposed illustration of transparent muscles showing exactly where they attach on the bones.
Some sites of the trivia kind can also be useful for learning compared anatomy, for example this archive with hundreds of photos of... yawning animals.
http://www.gapingmaws.com/index.html
Some pages can be more controversial. This site has an extensive collection of photos and information about cats, including many pages on deformities and mutations:
http://messybeast.com/
Showing in detail things like cyclopean stillborn kittens is on the brink of morbidness, but in this case it is done in a quite scientific and respectful way, and I found it useful for understanding certain things about deformities. In the end you cannot learn without noticing on your own details in real examples. The people who took the photos often had no clue on what to do in the unexpected event or didn't want or know how to suppress the kitten, so taking the photos likely didn't make the kitten's suffering longer, and seeing this site may spare the shock to other people later so they can have more resolve to do what must to be done.
There is a lot of useful stuff waiting out there...
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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This is really unusual. According to an Irish text on the life of Saints, there was one Saint Christopher who belonged to a species of anthropomorphic dog people.
Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. "Almighty God," he said, "give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted". An angel of God came to him and said: "God has heard your prayer."The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.
Full text:
http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/chrsirish.html
Some paintings can be seen here along with extra background.
http://www.beyond-the-pale.co.uk/dogsaints.htm
It is not clear how the concept of the dog head originated. The text is a fairly conventional Saint's tale, but reading it while remembering he is an anthro dog really does give it a new flavor!
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Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
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In 1972 a manga anticipated with unsettling precision and insight, although in a metaphorical way, the atmosphere of the "War on Terror" we are feeling thirty years later.
In the manga, demons were the original sentient creatures which ruled the Earth, and they had awakened after millenia of sleep only to find the Earth inhabited by humans, which they regarded as weak inferior beings. They wanted to take back the planet, but humans were too many and a war against them would have been too hard and costly. So demons used a different approach: they changed their appearence and began to mix with humans, who were totally unaware of their existence.
Grim events began to happen all over the world. A horrible murder here, a case of cannibalism there, people disappearing without any trace. An unusually high number of sons killed by their mothers and strange incidents in schools and public places. Fear soon began to build.
A demon and a human could become fused together in the right conditions, that is, if the human was in a very irrational frame of mind. If the human was in a normal, rational condition, the fusion would have lethal results and would only produce a deformed monster whose life could last only a few seconds. The demons knew it, but one day many demons acted at the same time and attempted fusions with random humans all over the world, all of them with lethal results for both the demon and the human. Demons revealed their presence this way, and at the same time a diabolic figure appeared in the skies of the whole world proclaiming that demons were everywhere, hidden among humans, and would soon wage war and destroy the human species.
This is part of the plot of Devilman by Go Nagai, and the first thing which needs to be noted is that the manga has nothing to do with either the cartoon series or the farce which is the recent live movie. They are different stories. Both of them take only the horror scenes while leaving out the most tought-provoking aspects of the manga, that is the critique to mankind's unability to act rationally in front of an unknown enemy and to people's willingness to give up freedom and peace in exchange for devoid promises of "security". The story was written in the years of the Cold War, but it really seems written yesterday.
I don't think Go Nagai meant to write a political story: he was just capable of great insight about the human nature, as confirmed by his most famous works like the Mazinger saga and Violence Jack. And insight let him write a story which unravels into more and more unsettling parallels with today's real world events, all the way down to an ending which is as much perfect, from a literary point of view, as it is chilling.
I won't spoiler any more of the story - it deserves to be red. In fact I am surprised that there has not been (as far as I can tell) a spike in Devilman's popularity in the last five years. I have never seen a review stressing the obvious parallels between its content and the terrorism issue: reviewers just point out it's full of gore and seem to miss that gore is not the point. Is it some kind of taboo to see such parallels in a comic?
Nagai's art was still rough at the time but this only adds to the manga's atmosphere of moral decadence. Even though it may be very hard to find it out of Japan I think it's worth looking for it. Once it is over it feels like taking a breath and returning to see the world in a rational way, for one's own good.
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scale's journal
