rawrdinosaurfriends

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

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I may have possibly set my dodo a little teensy weensy bit on fire

[img id] Animated, looping gif. An idle animation on a dodo made out of gelatinous lava, fiery flames, and stony bones. Its eyes are embers with flames bursting from behind them. The dodo is drawn in a cartoony style with outlines, cel shading, and vibrant colors. It's standing in one place at three-quarters view and kind of wiggly, with flames licking off its body. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Some paleo-flavored playing cards I designed for my upcoming indie game. The idea was to blend traditional playing card aesthetic with some of my favorite guys: Hallucigenia, Tiktaalik, and Archaeopteryx!... ...and monkeys...

[img id] Five playing cards from a simplified card deck based around simple numbers. These have been stylized to look like Bicycle playing cards, complete with flat creatures behaving like face cards in radial dual symmetry. The numerical cards all have broad white borders. Card 1: The white number 1 with a blue border, surrounded by red hallucigenia with white spikes and yellow tentacles, yellow flowers, on a black field. Card 2: The white number 2 with a yellow border, surrounded by blue tiktaalik with white eyes and geometric scale patterns, and red diamond/yellow sunburst designs on a black field.

Card 3: The white number 3 with a red border, surrounded by fancy yellow archaeopteryx with blue and red highlight feathers, with a tail made of hearts, on a black field.

Monkey Card: A special, minimalistic card with a black M surrounded by yellow, blue, and red borders in that order, with a monkey's face and attacking palms pointed towards the viewer aggressively. Text under this graphic reads 'MONKEYS' in capitalized black Futura. Card backing: This is a primarily black card backing, with a dominant diamond aesthetic rendered in white borders with fields of hairline white lines in all four corners. 'VOLCANGO' is the white horizontal text in the middle of the card, framed by two extremely minimalistic red volcanoes represented by triangles on top and bottom. [/end id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Shh he's sleeping

[img id] A cartoon dodo bird sleeping very intensely. The style of the dodo is drawn with thick outlines and little shading. The dodo is snoring as it sleeps. It was animated in a superfluid, vector style created by Spine2D. The dodo's color scheme was inspired by a modern reconstruction of this bird made by ornithologist Michael Hanson, but is otherwise a silly little cartoon bird. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Another little peek at the game so far! :) This is a rig meant for Spine2D.

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

I don't need new animals; I still like the old animals

[img id] Idle animation of a cartoon cel-shaded woolly mammoth. She stands on all four feet gently inhaling and exhaling, while her fur reacts and her tail and trunk waggle slightly, in a super fluid manner. Her fur is more on the orange side of brown, shiny and lustrous...a healthy pachyderm with gorgeous, liquidy eyes that you could sink into forever! Basically she looks like a woolly mammoth in original vintage late 90's Littlest Pet Shop toy aesthetic, but as a gif on your screen. [/img id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Messing with watercolor/pencil brushes in Adobe Fresco and thought people might want to see it, even though it’s not a comic and it’s not in my normal style. Byronosaurus!

[img id] Digital watercolor and pencil piece of a Byronosaurus in an abstract marshy environment. It is set during the evening when sunlight just crests the dinosaur’s feathers and causes its wings to glow. Its face is in sharp, bright relief of the sun, while the rest of its body is in shadow. The Byronosaurus is velociraptor-like in stature, with pronated wrists, wing claws, and upright toes on its feet. However, the Byronosaurus has a longer, beakier face, and is probably the nerd to the velociraptor’s jock. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

New! Stackable velociraptors

As seen on TV

[img id] Digital art of a human hand grasping a lime-green velociraptor. This velociraptor is going to be the fifth dinosaur added to a stack of four velociraptors. The other four velociraptors are in various states of accepting their stackable fate. They will be described from top-most velociraptor to bottom-most velociraptor. The blue velociraptor on top growls at the hand. The beige velociraptor, who has lime cheek markings, flaps and struggles. The sky-blue velociraptor has accepted their role in the stack of velociraptors, but hasn't quite slotted into position perfectly. The leaf-green velociraptor on the bottom is completely flat. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Hello my friends and fans of dinosaur lore!

RAWR! Dinosaur Friends was my first foray into webcomics. It went places I never imagined it would go: To conventions, to comics communities, and taped to museum worker's office doors. For this and continued support, I am massively grateful.

I stopped updating RAWR! a long time ago to refine my skills. I'd always been interested in longform storytelling. Amphiox here is my first try at a sequential story. If you liked my dinosaur one-shots, please consider giving my short graphic novel about magic doom eels a try. The story itself is already complete at 46 pages and will update once per day, guaranteed, with no hiatuses. Optional spoiler PDFs and online preorders for physical copies are available.

Thank you so much for checking out all of my silly little webcomics experiments and making me feel so...good? Yes. Just simply good.

http://amphiox.hmcgill.art

Oh gosh!! My webcomic, Amphiox, launches this Friday on the 16th! It is about magic doom eels.

It will update one page per day until the story is complete. Each page includes a full text transcript so everyone can read along.

[img id] Image depicted is the cover to the webcomic, Amphiox. It's a black cover with criss-crossing blue serpent coils taking up most of the background. The coils writhe around each other with faint glimmers of scales highlighted, before vanishing into darkness. This is a teaser for the beast that will be encountered and explained within the webcomic.

Layered over the writhing coils of the Amphiox is its tail, oddly centered and still compared to the rest of its body. An amphiox's tail ends in a fin with rounded tips. The fin's color is a bright, bioluminescent gradient composed of yellow fading into bright skyblue, before tapering into a darker cerulean. The tail has vibrating red highlights. It casts a rainbow of highlights onto its own scales. Attached to this tail are two more, lesser pectoral and dorsal fins, in cerulean blue. The pectoral fin pokes out near the tail, and the dorsal fin is further up, and larger. Layered onto the tail is a vertically-aligned title text: AMPHIOX. Beneath that is 'H. McGill' and 'http://amphiox.hmcgill.art' in white. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Back from the velociraptor haberdashery

[img id] Digital artwork of a velociraptor wearing multiple hats. The art was drawn from the velociraptor's bust upwards. The velociraptor is orange with tiger stripes and a blue tongue. She has black lips and a killer open-mouthed smile. On her head is a wide brim hat tied under her neck with a pink bow. An ostrich feather is sticking out of the wide brim hat. On top of the wide brim hat is a felt top hat with a pink leather belt and gold buckle. On top of that hat is a fedora because we just can't have nice things, can we. A little pink round hat is the next highest up. On top of all the hats is a pirate tricorner hat with a pink award pinned to it. Clearly this velociraptor is the fanciest she can possibly be. [/id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Ptempest in a Pteacup Rework of a very, very old piece. Perhaps some of you remember it. It was pterrible.

[img id]

Digital art of a very fancy tea part being raided by three small yellow pterosaurs. One is coming in for a landing over the manicured lawn. Another is fishing the tea bags out of the teapot with its beak. The third has adopted an overturned teacup as its home, where it can secret stolen sugar cubes. There's a rainbow over the scene. The tea party was shaping up to be pretty good before the pterosaurs arrived: A petit four, cupcake, donut, and fancy cutlery lie askew on a patterned tablecloth.

[end id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Quick lil psittacosaurus for you! Back into hiding for me.

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Afterlife

Featuring yi qi and the remains of a sauropod.

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Corythosaurus Fern Mandala

Free to color under Creative Commons by NC 3.0

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Ideally these two spreads would be part of a much longer comic narrative where the pterosaur spirals into anxiety after the bird informs it that it has nothing to worry about, for the pterosaur is already dead. Also, the bone diagrams are not peer-reviewed! Nothing I create is peer-reviewed.  Always do your own research. Thank you. [img id] Page 1 Panel 1: Depicts a dinosaur evolving into a bird on the left, and into a pterosaur on the right. Narration: This is incorrect! Panel 2: Depicts a dinosaur first evolving into a pterosaur, then evolving into a bird. Narration: This is also incorrect! Panel 3: Depicts a diagram on the left and a small scene on the right. The diagram shows an archosaur evolving into a dinosaur, then a bird. The archosaur evolves into a pterosaur. The scene depicts the anxious pterosaur on a small beach. Archosaur: (waving at dinosaur) hello Dinosaur: (waving at archosaur) hey Bird: (fluffing up happily) much better Pterosaur: (panicking) b...but... then why am I fuzzy and batlike Page 2 Panel 1: Depicts a bird, a pterosaur, and a bat flying in front of the goshdarned sun itself. Narration: It's the power of...Convergent evolution! Sometimes similar attributes arise in species that aren't descended from one another. Panel 3: Depicts a labeled cheese with mold on it, a ripe peach, and a wad of dryer lint. Narration: Other fuzzy things that aren't descended from pterosaurs. Page 3 A full-bleed, single panel page covered by a sky background. Floating in the clouds are skeletal diagrams of a bird and a pterosaur. The actual bird and pterosaur flutter nearby to provide commentary. Narration: But how do we know this is a case of convergent evolution? Bird: the clues are in the bones Narration: Compare these two skeletons. What observations can you make about them? Pterosaur: ...besides the grim inevitability of death Page 4 This page has five panels floating on a sky background. Panel 1: Depicts an x-ray of the pterosaur's wing. Narration: Since both animals fly, what do you notice about their wing structure? Panel 2: Depicts an x-ray of the bird's wing. No text. Panel 3: Depicts an x-ray of the pterosaur's pelvis. Narration: We can also look at other parts for clues, such as their hip bones! Panel 4: Depicts an x-ray of the bird's pelvis. The pterosaur and the bird are perched on this panel. Bird: relax Bird: everyone has bones inside Pterosaur: no its morbid!!! Narration: (Depicted next to a small pencil on paper) Try drawing or tracing the bones to see their differences!

The final two image graphics in this post are the pages depicted earlier, but put together in full-spread form so that readers can envision how it would look in a comic book. [end id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

To the person who brought up tiktaalik in the tags: As far as I know, tiktaalik didn’t persist into the Carboniferous and is not depicted in the scene above, but I want to acknowledge the tiktaalik enthusiasm because I like them too. Here you go, a little visitor from the Devonian, with some low-effort lycopsids. I also saved some blank lines (CC BY-NC 3.0) if you want to color it! 

[img id 1 of 2: Digital artwork of a tiktaalik, which is a fish that has lobe-like fins allowing it to crawl across the ground. Scientists propose that the tiktaalik shares the common ancestor between fish and all existing tetrapods and is an example of a transitional fossil. The depicted tiktaalik is submerged with its lobe fins on the bottom of a shallow pond covered with gravel. Three ancient plants called lycopsids are arranged around the tiktaalik, and they look like weird green pitchforks with only two tines. The plants were probably not rendered very accurately because all of the reference I could find was crunched and hard to make out. img id 2 of 2 is the same image, but the colors are omitted so interested parties may color it for themself.]

Carboniferous friends.

Lineart is available to color under CC BY-NC 3.0 license.

[img id=Digital artwork depicting a slice of the Carboniferous period, 359.2-299 million years ago. A logo at the top of a globe with a ribbon encourages viewers to ‘spot ‘em all!’. The digital artwork contains over 250 Carboniferous organisms with lots of different colors and textures. The artist’s favorite organisms here are the shark with a pillar full of teeth on its head (stethacanthus), the 6-foot long centipede (Arthropleura), and edaphosaurus, an early synapsid with a big frill on its back. The organisms are displayed on a pre-Pangea map and large artistic conveniences were taken with regards to which things lived in Antarctica during the Carboniferous. Apologies for not listing every single organism, but rest assured, if you have a favorite animal or plant from the Carboniferous, it’s probably here somewhere!

The second image is the same as the first, only it’s just lines, and ready for coloring. /end img id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Carboniferous friends.

Lineart is available to color under CC BY-NC 3.0 license.

[img id=Digital artwork depicting a slice of the Carboniferous period, 359.2-299 million years ago. A logo at the top of a globe with a ribbon encourages viewers to 'spot 'em all!'. The digital artwork contains over 250 Carboniferous organisms with lots of different colors and textures. The artist's favorite organisms here are the shark with a pillar full of teeth on its head (stethacanthus), the 6-foot long centipede (Arthropleura), and edaphosaurus, an early synapsid with a big frill on its back. The organisms are displayed on a pre-Pangea map and large artistic conveniences were taken with regards to which things lived in Antarctica during the Carboniferous. Apologies for not listing every single organism, but rest assured, if you have a favorite animal or plant from the Carboniferous, it's probably here somewhere!

The second image is the same as the first, only it’s just lines, and ready for coloring. /end img id]

[rawrdinosaurfriends]

Today I would like to offer free (for personal/non-commercial use) natural history coloring pages. This one’s based on the Cambrian explosion. Let me know what you think. Top has gray background to help if you only want to color the critters, bottom has white background if you want to choose the color there.

If you color one, please tag me and I will reblog it.