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LiveJournal for scale.
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| Monday, January 7th, 2008 |
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A close up photo of two penguins with almost perfect feathers, showing the texture of feathers on their backs and how the size of feathers decreases near the flippers until they look almost like scales: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/908868/ Not too much informative but still nice to see, a comparison of claws of different animals (follow the larger images link): http://www.boneclones.com/KO-100-SE http://www.boneclones.com/images/KO_100 The cheetah's claws being not completely retractile are quite different from other feline claws... also never noticed before that an eagle's claws may be as long as a bear's! Two more nice close-ups of tiger paws: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/432324/ http://www.furaffinity.net/view/432365/ (EDIT: my skull obviously contains lemon-flavored jelly, because they are the paws of a leopard and a puma and the fur color shows it too.) A model of Archaeopteryx, photos from the Wikipedia page: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c Isn't it adorable? I'd like to hug it... for some odd coincidence it seems to have the same mallard-like pattern of my gryphon Siria too. |
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| Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 |
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This swimming tiger named Odin is quite popular on internet, though only now I have been looking better at his photos and they show a detail which I'm finding quite amazing. It is relatively obvious that he would keep the nostrils closed underwater by contracting the muscles around them: http://basecor.com/images/tiger.jpg Being able to seal the nostrils looks like an adaptation for swimming that other felines may have too and it is not so surprising, but in many other photos he has the mouth fully open and yet it seems that almost no air is escaping from it: http://amazingfiltered.blogspot.com/200 These nice videos show that even when he swallows slices of meat underwater he is releasing a minimal quantity of air: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgsrT8Z http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPCFFJI0 So appearently tigers can keep the airways in their throat shut as well, at least for a few seconds. Quick look to the site which makes you wish to be licked (more or less): http://www.gapingmaws.com/Tigers/pics/3 http://www.gapingmaws.com/Tigers/pics/7 Lions sure don't get to swim as much as tigers in the wild, but the visible part of their throat looks pretty similar: http://www.gapingmaws.com/Lions/pics/39 http://www.gapingmaws.com/Lions/pics/51 So maybe lions can do it too? Maybe all big cat lovers already know the answers, but to me this is quite surprising. :-) |
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| Friday, December 7th, 2007 |
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Now that everybody seems to have a hi-res digital camera, Wikipedia is becoming one of the best sources of unusual and "curiosity driven" photos of animals, I mean photos which show as much as possible the animal's features rather than going for a dramatic effect or for technical perfection. The flying foxes pages are a good example and have some excellent photos which show their gross wing structure and many nice details. I think it would be next to impossible to find something like this on a photo book. Not that I've ever seen one about flying foxes! http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c (NSFW) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e (NSFW) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e Even if slighly flawed these two are amazing, they give more anatomical information than whole yearly runs of many nature magazines. :-) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e Also some cute babies: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c From another site, this is the best bat skeleton I have seen so far: http://www.nhc.ed.ac.uk/images/collecti |
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| Monday, December 3rd, 2007 |
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Closeup of beaver teeth. Some years ago I used to find very creepy the sight of spongy bones (and body tissues in general) like the ones at the base of these... http://www.furaffinity.net/view/831308/ More photos, these can be enlarged to a decent size with right-click->View Image: http://campus.murraystate.edu/acade Two (smaller) views of the open maw: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/thezone/ani http://www.skullsite.co.uk/Sewell/sewel Well anchored teeth appearently: http://www.science-art.com/gallery/82/8 Altough some animals like the Barbirusa hog cling even more fiercely to their teeth, the lower one is so large it probably makes the jaw bone a lot stronger with its mere presence: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/thezone/ani http://www.papuaweb.org/dlib/bk/wal Also stumbled upon this page, there are some interesting high resolution reconstructions of the gross anatomy of an ancient relative of mammals with a beaver-like tail: http://www.carnegiemnh.org/news/06-j The shape of the shoulder blades is especially cute, appearently it had a large and rigid bone structure in place of the sternum and shoulders, much like a second pelvis and actually much larger than the lower one. The shoulder blades make me think of vertical levers. I'd really like to know how they were moved. The back of the rib cage looks almost like a protection shell, which is also quite cute. http://www.carnegiemnh.org/news/06-j Excellent photo of cougar skull showing the thin bone sheets inside the nose which support the olfactory mucosa. It is so well preserved and with such perfect teeth that it makes me feel sorry for the cougar it comes from, even if it might be a reconstruction... http://www.uwsp.edu/wildlife/carniv Same bones are also visible here, this time it is a coyote. There is a visible difference, they look much more branched and finely carved here. I guess there is quite some difference in the total surface of the mucosa (but in part I think it is due to the coyote being much smaller and needing more branching to fit enough sniffing surface in its snout). http://www.troyskulltaxidermy.com/image |
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| Friday, November 30th, 2007 |
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So yeah, this year I am sending out two reindeer, ten happy chakats and twelve clones of Synnabar, among other things. You'll better start making room. ^_^ And hope you are not among the naughties who get a drawing Italian politician. On the twelfth day of Christmas,  scale sent to me...Twelve synnabars drummingEleven computers piping Ten chakats a-leaping Nine antlers dancing Eight politics a-drawing Seven anthropomorphics a-programming Six comics a-painting Five ani-i-i-imals Four watercolors Three ancient books Two rangifer tarandus ...and a religion in a sociology. ...and this one has something which will BETTER be a joke!!! In 2007, scale resolves to...Admit my true feelings to sofawolf.Become a better arte. Be nicer to kenket.Find a new science. Give up antlers. Buy new ancient books. Give up antlers.Give up antlers.Give up antlers.............. |
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| Monday, August 13th, 2007 |
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Wow, haven't updated in a while! Three pictures completed with leonardo: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p Chakasa Kimba is based mostly on the look of Kimba in the 1997 movie. Chakasa bluefire thinking of something very interesting: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p Fuocoblu and Father Jonas (the married main characters from the chakasa stories) in an intimate moment: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p Deer and wolves having fun, also with Siria: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p |
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| Sunday, June 24th, 2007 |
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Something more about unicorns... (NSFW) http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p |
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| Monday, April 23rd, 2007 |
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http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p |
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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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| 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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| Saturday, February 10th, 2007 |
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Shamelessly following the idea of tmiket and sans_souci, here are the comments on my Artspots application. I suspect problems with shading have been a quite common cause of rejection, by now many furry artists have a decent grasp of anatomy but I guess we really like to show everything of our creatures, so dropping heavy shadows looks like spoiling the picture. :-) I will try again as soon as I have pictures which fit the guidelines but I'm not in a hurry. There other issues with my art which I find more urgent, especially issues born out of fears like my utter inability to draw decent humans. I'm also trying to do actual painting on canvas without any preliminary sketches, which I consider among the most important thing I should learn at the moment. ( Read more... ) |
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| Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 |
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I'd like to paint some more background but couldn't find anything interesting for now, so it's probably finished: ( NSFW ) I have also added to the Junk page some subpages for all commission-related sketches, there are already some I'm working on. Note that the page URL has changed. http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p |
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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_p 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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| 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_p http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p 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_p 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/A 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/Bar 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/v058n0 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/fil 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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| 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_p 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_p Also updated the junk section: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p In order: - 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. - A horrible accident which happened during a very hard obstacle course at olympic games for anthro animals. Appearently some "small" flaws in the design of legs had been hidden in order hasten the release of anthro horses, hoping that the condition of extreme stress which would lead to the rupture of the foot tendons would not happen soon... (Actually suggested by the ugly horse runs which are held in Siena and other cities in Italy, on narrow and very curved tracks around city squares, which all too often end with the death or mutilation of some horses. The wound is based on a real occurrence.) - Flying foxes under test. - Panel of a possible comic. - Forest foxtaurs, tree climbing enabled. :-) They 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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I've just found a really weird comic in 3D graphics (not worksafe): http://www.klinefx.com/DreamwalkJourn.h It shows many crazy and very interesting ideas, and cute designs of anthro insects. I like the slightly toony eyes and bee heads, altought they could have been more insect-like as for most other insects. The spider heads and the giant dragonfly are especially well built. http://www.klinefx.com/P11.html http://www.klinefx.com/P12.html http://www.klinefx.com/P13.html http://www.klinefx.com/P14.html http://www.klinefx.com/P25.html http://www.klinefx.com/P29.html http://www.klinefx.com/P101.html http://www.klinefx.com/P106.html |
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Cute: ( My Interests Collage! ) Create your own! Originally Written By
ga_woo, Hosted and ReWritten by darkman424 |
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| Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 |
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I have passed today the last exam!! Wow. All the bureaucracy is done, the thesis is delivered, now the only thing left is the discussion two weeks from now. At some point in July I honestly tought I wouldn't get so far. ^_^ Updated panel 8 of the current comic, plus 7 a few days ago: http://www.snowcovered.it I'm testing on my gallery a Python script by leonardo which selects the best fitting background color for each page by finding the mean color of an area near the borders of the image. For many images the effect of an appropriate background color is wonderful, especially underwater scenes: http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p http://www.snowcovered.it/gallery_p Also testing a simple change to show a resized preview of the largest images, because some were so large they sucked on an 800x600 screen or 56k line. Sorry! :-P |
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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/H And what about some thylacine sheets? http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/H 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_ - 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/albu 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.htm 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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LiveJournal for scale.
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