mint-eurypterid

[mint-eurypterid]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

[mint-eurypterid]

fun behaviors to give dragons that aren't feline/canine based

cause as much as i love dragons purring and roaring i wish there was just more variety in how they would act

clacking their teeth together to show contentedness/happiness (budgies)

using tails as a defensive weapon in a whip like fashion (iguana)

twitching to express that they're not a threat to members of their species (hognose snake)

feeling calm when eyes are hooded/covered (birds of prey)

head bobbing as a threat display (anoles/bearded dragons)

flattening neck or sides to appear bigger (snakes/lizards)

mantling over food to protect it from hatchmates (birds of prey)

wiggling neck as a courting maneuver (budgies)

audibly grinding teeth as a warning (macaques)

maintained eye contact as a challenge (gorillas)

pounding wings against sides as a threat (gorillas)

slapping other dragons with their claws when their personal bubble is invaded (seals)

hoards used as a site to impress mates (birds of paradise)

snorting when undergoing heightened stress (horses)

making repeated loud noises with surroundings to establish territory (woodpeckers)

loud constant arguments with other dragons when roosting (bats)

building lairs that cause a domino effect of change in the land around them (beavers)

slapping their tails against the ground/water as a warning (beavers)

wiggling tail tip to attract prey (various animals)

wiggling tail tip as a warning (snakes)

plucking or scraping off scales as a sign of stress (parrots)

raising spines/frills as a response to danger and carrying on with their usual business as they believe they're protected (lionfish)

and im not saying canine and feline behaviors are wrong or bad to give a dragon (people wouldn't write dragons with those behaviors if they weren't fun in the first place!) but i feel for creatures that are mythological giant winged lizards that you can do more and get experimental with it. often the more unfamiliar behavior the more dragony the dragon feels

[mint-eurypterid]

Getting started with native plants can be a bit overwhelming for beginners. The best thing to do is find a reliable native plant source that doesn’t use pesticides and sticks with the wild versions of the plants, instead of growing “cultivars”, or human-modified versions of the plant. In Philly that’s pretty easy to do! We have lots of sources for these plants. But it’s not so easy everywhere. I made this guide for how to make the call on whether a plant is worth buying when the situation may not be ideal. This is not the be-all end-all guide for gardening. It’s a quick start guide for beginners! I think it’s important that we meet people halfway with these messages. I want to see all my friends and neighbors growing pesticide-free straight-species plants. If I wait for that to happen I’ll be waiting until I’m dead. So tell your friends. Plant native plants today!

[mint-eurypterid]

Today's aesthetic: when a cat decides it's going to make a very difficult or precise jump, spends several minutes examining the problem from all angles and warming up its muscles and minutely adjusting the positions of its paws and such, then proceeds to totally eat shit.

[mint-eurypterid]

this is so sweet 🥺🥺🥺

[mint-eurypterid]

spiders have got to figure out contracting I need to be able to call my local spiders union and be like "hey can you send a guy out for a few days the fruit flies are back" and then pay it in spider currency. I'll learn the conversion rates. I'll be generous with my rounding. please.

[mint-eurypterid]

PENGUINS. all of them!

(not precisely to scale, but close)

[mint-eurypterid]

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

[mint-eurypterid]

Know your insect antennae!

[mint-eurypterid]

Commission for @magmacannon of a Dunkleosteus riding a wave.

[mint-eurypterid]

hey, don't cry. >10,000 isopod species. >5,000 types of potato. ~48,000,000 trans people. we can do this

[mint-eurypterid]

Henlo land-friends!

I got the coughs really bad and still am recovering! Which is why I have been MIA! But anomalocaris still care! Please hydrate today 💚

[mint-eurypterid]

who else loves anomalocaris

[mint-eurypterid]

I have been trying to write fic (well, smut) set in a world where certain things are slightly different to serve the fic's plot.

However, each time I try I have run into a problem: my head insists I need to justify the changes - I need to know comprehensive details about how the world works so I can ensure everything is consistent and not too f'd up.

So I get bogged down, and don't write a word. What do?

In your position, I’d sit down and write myself a bible.

This is how I did my prep for Barbie: Fairytopia.* And how I’ve done it for various works of fic presently on AO3… and how I’m doing it right now for the new Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rats of Sumatra III project. I was taught this art by my animation story editors at Hanna-Barbera, and it’s stood me in good stead. (Peter and I pulled down our first miniseries assignment from a company that told us “we gave great bible.” And that was true.) 😄

When I say “bible” I don’t necessarily mean something that thick! (Though some of mine have been pretty hefty, with one TV project’s bible running more than a hundred pages… because I knew I had skeptical and underinformed TV execs to convince about something historical.) For the kind of purpose we’re describing here, your prep bible could be quite short: maybe looking like a bullet-pointed “shopping list”, five or ten pages long. It can be just as long or short as it needs to be to cover all your salient points.

The idea is simply to put down, in concrete form, a list of the main “different things” you need to know and remember about your alternate universe when you’re working in it. This is where you do your justification work, in as much or as little detail as you need to convince yourself you’ve got the necessary bases covered. The virtual “stage manager” who sits at the back of the theater of the Writing Department in your mind, judging when things are right, will be your guide here, and will advise you as to when you’ve got enough and it’s time to stop. And once this stuff is down on the page, you’ll be a position to judge critically whether everything makes enough sense to work with, and slots together correctly.

This is also a bit like (for the prose part of a project) outlining, in that it’s incredibly freeing. Once you’ve got this background nailed down, you know you can safely turn your attention away from it and get down to the serious business: drama, and the character interactions that express it. (And inevitably as you’re doing the bible writing, you start getting ideas for how the substrate you’re laying down is going to affect the conflicts between and among the characters. The bible stage can be incredibly fruitful this way.)

It would be facile to describe the bibling process as “getting the easy part over with first”. Because sometimes it’s not easy! But it’s worth doing first, because having done this first relieves you of the ongoing anxiety caused by knowing you may have to keep inventing or rationalizing stuff on the fly. (Which can produce the kind of micro-blocks that a writer can generally really do without.) …Not that you’re not going to be inventing things on the fly anyway: that’s a normal part of the writing process. But the biggest and most obvious issues will have been handled already, and you’ll know they have; which is always a weight off one’s mind. And the fewer of those weights you have loading you down, when you’re in the midst of the labor of composition, the better.

Anyway, give it a shot and see how it works for you. And then you can, like the rest of us smut writers, get on to the really pressing business: making sure you haven’t lost track of where all the characters’ arms and legs (and things) are when you’re writing those hot steamy sex scenes. 😏

Hope this helps!

*ETA: My remit on this job did include creating a bible for them. But I write a rough-draft one for myself first, including various meta that I needed but they didn't.

[mint-eurypterid]

End-of-month sale post~

Velociraptor: $2500

All the rest: $270

Message me directly if you're interested in one~

[mint-eurypterid]

future archaeologists will know you were (not) a boy

[mint-eurypterid]

BIG PLESIOSAUR NEWS I'm delighted to finally reveal the illustration I produced for the paper "Skin, scales, and cells in a Jurassic plesiosaur"!

While already excavated in 1940 this specimen was only really prepared in 2020 and new analysis methods revealed a wealth of details, many unseen until now.

Some of the coolest finds are thickened skin folds, remands of a possible tail fluke and scales on the paddles.

Beyond these superficial elements these specimen also has cellular details preserved. Among them melanophore traces hinting at the pigmentation of the animal.

You can read more about it in the publication! Also, stay tuned for more stuff regarding fossils from Holzmaden!

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00001-6