Kobold Bashing

In the Squawk role-playing game, kobolds are intelligent theropod dinosaurs. They are roughly humanoid in shape, except for having four fingers or toes on each limb, a prehensile tail and a typical theropod snout including a mouth full of sharp teeth. Kobolds are tree-climbing predators, with similarities to cats and primates. They are acrobatic and powerfully muscled for their size (about 1.6 m tall.)

The long feathers on the head are a single solid color in males (often black, white, red or yellow, but sometimes other colors) and a more complex pattern of more earthy colors in females. Both sexes have variable patterns of spots and thinner fur-like plumage on the neck, shoulders and other parts of the body.

The picture on the right shows a compact body shape more typical of advanced theropods like allosaurus, tyrannosaurus and velociraptor than the long body and human-like pinched waist of the kobold. When I made this drawing we were working on making some of the most humanoid Squawk species more dinosaur-like. (This was shortly before the discovery of the relatively long-bodied arboreal feathered theropod Microraptor.)

Raptor Rapture

Dromaeosaurs are those sickle clawed "raptor" dinosaurs which have become contenders for scariest dinosaurs in popular imagination (in spite of their modest size) thanks to Jurassic Park.

If you know your dromaeosaurs, you probably thought those "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park were a tad on the big side. That's because they are actually supposed to be Deinonychus, a man-sized dromeosaur species which Greg Paul had classified as a subspecies of Velociraptor for a while. You can see this in Paul's excellent dinosaur art/science book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (hardcover and paperback versions available at Amazon.com.) Since writing that book, Greg Paul has concluded that Deinonychus is actually a separate species after all. (The Jurassic Park Deinonychus are still much bigger than they should be, but the dromaeosaur Utahraptor actually was that big.)

Jurassic Park's "raptors" inherited another mistake which was common for dinosaur artists and scientists at the time: the wrists are broken. The palms of predatory dinosaur hands face inward, not backward, with the "thumbs" pointing forward - like the wrists of a bird or like our hands when we climb a rope, but not when we climb a ladder. I was at the "Collossal Fossils" exhibit at the Pacific Science Center recently and all of the predatory dinosaurs had their wrists the wrong way. When you look at the bones up close you can see how this just doesn't work.

When I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have any feathered dinosaurs. They used the Greg Paul's new classification scheme, and his ridiculously fast Tyrannosaurus, but left out his feathered dromaeosaurs! Paul illustrated all of his small dinosaurs with downy "protofeathers" and gave the dromaeosaurs wing feathers. We don't know if all of the small dinosaurs had feathers, but last month Alan Turner, Peter Makovicky and Mark Norell described direct physical evidence for flight feathers on the forearms of Velociraptor.

Dromaeosaurs are so closely related to birds, that they might actually be secondarily flightless descendants of the first flying dinosaurs. I recently read Greg Paul's new book on this subject: Dinosaurs of the Air. The new book is more science and less art-oriented than Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Paul looks at dinosaur metabolism in terms of aerobic excercise (instead of "warm blooded or cold blooded") which allows us to draw conclusions from the bones themselves, and even identify which dinosaurs probably had "in-between" metabolisms.

Hobgoblin vs. The 'Roid

In the Squawk RPG, a hobgoblin is an intelligent dromaeosaur. The basic body plan is like other dromaeosaurs, but the flexibility of the hand and arms is increased and a much larger brain gives the skull a bulbous, rounded shape.

1. (top left) street-fighter with feet and hands wrapped
2. (top right) armored with saber and wing-shaped sheild
3. (middle) soldier with helmet and revolver bayonets
4. (bottom left) bioarmor with rockets and arm cannons
5. (bottom right) wizard? on fire!?
   

I like this series of sketches because it gives the basic concept of the Squawk setting at a glance. The hobgoblin at the top left has his hands in the "broken wrist" orientation from Jurassic Park - which might be easier for hobgoblins than other dromaeosaurs, but isn't the most natural position.

The hobgoblin's "conservative" shape - very similar to the real-life dromaeosaurs - is in part a reaction to Dale Russel's dinosauroid. Dromaeosaurs are already big-headed bipeds with grasping hands, so the dinosauroid's human-like body shape is mostly superfluous. See my gremlin post for more information.

Freddy vs. Wolverine

Gryphons are one of the first intelligent species we invented for the Squawk Role-Playing Game, but they have settled on their current form only recently. This drawing is a slightly modified version of the original and totally awesome design by my brother Ulrich.

The bird-like appearance is superficial: Gryphons and Gargoyles belong to a fictional group of archosaurs resembling crocodiles with long, flexible, otter-like bodies. (Also in this fictional family are the snake-like guivres.) While Gargoyles became stealthier with naked, color-changing skin, Gryphons became large, powerful, tiger-like predators with huge claws. At some point the Gryphon ancestors aquired insulating pseudo-feathers similar to dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and lost their teeth, so Gryphons rip at their prey with sharp beaks.Gryphons are extraordinarily flexible, moving like a cross between a cat and a snake. All of their joints have a wide range of motion. They can curl up into a ball and wrap around trees. This flexibility helps them to climb, move through tight spaces and crawl through tall ground cover when stalking prey.
At one point gryphons were becoming a less flexible dinosaur design related to archaeopteryx and sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs. In this drawing we can see a combination of archaeopteryx, feathering, anthropomorphic torso and sickle-clawed feet. (It looks like I left an extra toe on one of the feet.) This is totally unlike the current Gryphon idea.

Here is an effort to rehabilitate the same drawing as a modern gryphon with a toothless beak and four huge talons on each foot. The tail, with it's archaeopteryx-like feather pattern, will probably have to go.

Avoid the 'Roid

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, a gremlin is an intelligent primitive bird or bird-like dinosaur without feathers. Gremlins have one of the proportionally largest brains of all the intelligent species, but they are one of the smaller species.

Large eyes with cat-like pupils give gremlins excellent vision in a wide range of lighting conditions. Gremlins have a limited sense of smell because of their short snouts. They have only three fingers on each hand (a thumb and two other fingers), but each touch-sensitive soft-tipped finger is both strong and dextrous. A vertical spinal column and modified shoulders give them an improved range of arm motion as well as balancing the brainy skull.

(The narrow hips of the floating gremlin above is a degenerate condition related to living in low gravity. Most gremlins have wide hips which form the round bottom half of an egg-shaped torso.)

Gremlins are plantigrade - they walk on their heels. This helps their vertical posture, but they have very long feet and run with all of their weight on a single toe. This is similar to the way humans run, but more extreme. Gremlins have one other toe which helps them balance while standing and walking. The inside toe - which is often adapted as a sickle-claw or reversed and elongated for perching in other birds and bird-like dinosaurs - is completely absent in gremlins.

Gremlins are partly inspired by paleontologist Dale Russel's speculative "Dinosauroid". Zoology blogger Darren Naish has proposed a much better candidate for super-intelligent dinosaur ancestor and surreal artist Nemo Ramjet has provided a nice illustration.

To Write a Post about Gargoyles

This is one of the best re-imaginings of a Squawk race by my brother Ulrich. For our Xanadu setting he re-invented the dragon-like, chameleon-skinned Gargoyle as a long-bodied Japanese dragon anthropomorphized in the tradition of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This added more oriental flavor to the Xanadu culture and gave us a memorable look for a race that was not well represented in the artwork.
Gargoyles are able to change the color and pattern of their skin like a chameleon or cephalopod to communicate and disguise themselves. As intelligent creatures they can invent new disguises and stealth techniques. In this drawing we see how individual difference in texture can be exploited to blend in with different environments.
We tried to imagine how a long, low crocodile-like head could contain the large brain of an intelligent species. horns add a hard-edged, squared look to a domed forehead. The entire head is large relative to the body. At some point you have to look past stereotypes (relative brain size is not all-important, some fish and birds have more brain-to-body mass than humans) and accept what just looks cool.
One feature that Ulrich did not dig about gargoyles was the flappy, erectable neck frill, so these have become something of an optional feature - a display organ that is very large in some male gargoyles and absent in females and some males.

I Played Dungeons and Dragons for Three Hours. Then I was Slain by an Elf.

The intelligent species of the Squawk role-playing game are named after creatures from mythology. Squawk Elves are carnivorous flightless birds with long, powerful arms. Elves can catch prey with the retractable talons of their hands and feet, and break bones with their powerful beak, but they are also intelligent hunters who employ strategy and weapons. The elves were once the masters of a multi-planet dynasty based around electrical technology, but now most elves live in small nomadic bands or minority communities among the other intelligent species.My original concept for the elves was a neckless creature with absurdly massive claws. All four feed would be equipped like the right foot in this drawing. This would make them the "Wolverine" or "Freddy Kruger" of the Squawk universe. (Most of the intelligent species seem to be competing for this position, but the current champions seem to be Gryphons.)

My brother Ulrich developed this alternate visualization of Elf anatomy. In this version, the elf stil has a powerful neck, round body, and similarly-proportioned arms and legs with sharp claws, but the length of the claws is less extreme (but more consistent than my drawings) and the neck is long enough for the head to look around.

Recipe for Disaster

1 can frozen white grape juice concentrate
1 package grape Kool-Aid artificially flavored soft drink mix
water
sugar

Prepare white grape juice and Kool-Aid according to the directions on the can and package. Mix together in a large pitcher. My dad says it's the worst of all the bad combinations of juice and Kool-Aid. I think it takes like Oregon-grape berries. Oregon-grape has a subtle flavor similar to boysenberries with an earthy twist. Unless you pick Oregon-grape berries at the exact moment of peak ripeness they are puckeringly tart.

Everybody to the Limit

These were all of the intelligent species of the Squawk role-playing game about a year ago. Since then we have removed a few from the list. Unicorns lacked good art. Harpies were too humanoid. Gryphons and Cockatrices were combined.

This draconian was intentionally anthropormorphized. It's a "teenage mutant ninja Draconian". A more "realistic" draconian would have shorter arms, narrower shoulders and less waist.

"Realistic" renderings emphasize the anatomy of the species and the features that make it unique. Anthropomorphic renderings create characters which are sometimes easier to relate to. (The broad chest sends a message that this draconian is physically powerful.) Squawk creatures in different styles and media and interpreted by different artists give new perspectives, and sometimes lead to improvement in creature designs.

Dragon Skin

While drawing Draconians, we started discussing how crocodile skin is textured. Crocodiles are (mostly) covered in non-overlapping "scutes" like dinosaurs, turtles, bird legs, and lizard faces, but different from the overlapping diamond-shaped scales on the bodies of snakes and lizards.

Crocodile faces are actually smooth, without scales, but they do have ridges, bumps and short horns. They have no lips, so the skin of a crocodile's head is pulled tight over it's skull. The skin over the jaw-closing muscle toward the back of the mouth is wrinkled or scaly with the main creases parallel to the jaw and the bottom of the skull. The jaw is faintly scaled (you can barely see the creases) and the throat skin under the jaw has scales arranged in a neat rectangular grid.

Two prominent ridges on a crocodiles face run from the top of the skull, over the eyes and toward the nostrils. Similar ridges are found on other archosaurs, sometimes enhanced with crests like Dilophosaurus or horns like Carnotaurus. The only living dinosaurs - birds - don't have lips or scaly faces, so it's tempting to imagine how dinosaur faces might resemble crocodiles, but Carnotaurus had scales on it's face, and the jury is still out on dinosaur lips (and cheeks.)

The scales on the crocodile's neck, body and tail follow this neat rectangular pattern, as if the crocodile were divided into short segments (rows) like a worm and each segment was divided into the same number of scales lined up in neat columns running from the head to the tip of the tail. These columns are pinched above the shoulder near the top of each leg as if the columns were pushed apart to make room to insert the front and back legs. The scale pattern is also pinched at the back of the jaw. Irregular areas are filled in with smaller scales.

The scales of the back are combined into armored plates which are twice the width of a normal scale, with the creases aligned to every other row of smaller scales. Some of the columns of armor scales have a raised ridge in the middle of each scale. Two rows of ridged scales, starting just over the back legs, have higher and higher ridges, sometimes resembling a pair of fins.
The scales of the side are bumpy and there may be one or two more columns of large, ridged scales on the side, alternating with small bumpy scales. The scales of the belly are smooth.

The scales of crocodile limbs are not neatly parallel and perpendicular to the central axis of the limbs. Instead the main segments seem to run through the limbs like slices in the direction of water flowing around the limbs bent at natural zig-zag angles from the body (so the limb bones are 45 degrees one way or the other from the axis of the spine.) The scales of the hands and feet are similar to the pattern seen on birds.

(Images from the Flickr pages of liquidindian and hiyori13 shared with the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license.)

A Good Day to Dilophosaurus

In European mythology, a Lindworm is a snake-like dragon with two legs (or sometimes no legs). In Squawk a Lyndwyrm is any two-legged predator with small forelimbs and a long tail, such as this Dilophosaurus.

Dilophosaurus was one of the minor stars of the movie Jurassic Park. There's no evidence for the neck frill or poison spitting. A scary animatronic dilophosaurus from Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon, England spits like the JP Dilophosaurus. (Sloppy science? Pandering? Guilty on both counts?) The movie says the dilophosaurus is a "juvenile". A real adult Dilophosaurus would have been twenty feet (six meters) long.

Draconian

Squawk Draconians are intelligent crocodilians with short snouts, strong legs that allow them to walk bipedally, and short powerful arms with opposeable thumbs. The strange long-snouted creature in the lower right with extra arms is a genetically modified (chimaeric) draconian. Draconians are comfortable both on land and in the water. When they wear clothes, they prefer garments that minimize drag while swimming.

My intelligent crocodile is a strange idea, but there were real crocodile relatives who ran around on long legs, climbed trees, looked like ichthyosaurs or sharks, had short snouts (and ate plants) and even a giant crocodilian filter feeder who caught tiny prey like a baleen whale.

Here are some more Draconians I scanned in recently. My earlier draconian drawings were more anthropomorphic with shorter bodies and longer arms than they should have.

Enter the Dragon

In the Squawk role-playing game, "dragon" is a common name for four-legged predators. Because the big predators in Squawk are archosaurs, most dragons have a classic "reptilian" shape like the crocodile above, and many of them are equally at home in the water or on land.
I like to call this critter the "catoplebas". The forelegs are probably much too long compared to the back legs. Most archosaurs have longer hind legs and higher hips than shoulders. (Obvious exceptions would include high-shouldered sauropods like Brachiosaurus, and some birds.)

Strange as it may seem, crocodiles are more closely related to birds than to lizards. Birds are dinosaurs, and some dinosaurs have toothy snouts, long tails, and scaly armor like crocodiles, but it's still hard to see the bird-crocodile connection because (modern) crocodiles are specialized for living in water (a bit like archosaurian otters.)

It's easier to see the kinship between crocodiles and dinosaurs (including birds) when we look at the different ways that crocodiles move. Like lizards, crocodiles can crawl on their bellies, but when crocodiles need to walk a long distance, lift their bodies off the ground or move quickly, they can use the "high walk" and "gallop", which are very different from the ways lizards walk and run. (This video was posted on YouTube by crocodilian.com.)

Reading between the Lines

I have been introducing myself to the Ruby programming language. You can try Ruby with this interactive console that runs in your browser. Ruby is a little different from Python, but it seems to be in the same class when it comes to getting work done instead of mucking about in Java or C++.

I have been touching up more mechanical-pencil-on-lined-paper drawings. This was originally from The Dark Woods, a predecessor of the Squawk role-playing game. The character on the right was a "seuss" - a vagely dog-like humanoid race with short noses and long ears. I have removed the ears so hopefully he can pass as a Squawk gremlin. This was the most difficult line-removal project so far because I had to grab samples of blue lines from all over the picture. On some of other lined-paper drawings I may have to grab the blue with the dropper tool and draw in the blue lines manually.

This comparison of predatory dinosaurs I drew about 12 or 13 years ago is strongly influenced by Greg Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. (Perhaps I should say it was more strongly influenced by Greg Paul's book. The influence of this book overwhelms the meager power of superlatives.) This picture contrasts the long, thin bodies and flexible tails of early theropods such as Coelophysis and Dilophosaurus with the compact, barrel-chested bodies and reduced or stiffened tails of dromaeosaurs, phorusrhacids and tyrannosaurs.

This is a speculatively feathered Lagosuchus (from the Latin "rabbit-crocodile" - a great name, but the original specimen is not very good, so it may be replaced by Marasuchus.) Lagosuchus is probably a "dinosauromorph" - a very close relative of dinosaurs. If some dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or fuzzy insulation, perhaps they inherited this feature from a common ancestor, and all of the big scaly dinosaurs descended from small fluffy ancestors.

The Squawk universe has some new animals that are not found on our world. Some have evolved in alien environments and others have been bred or engineered by intelligent species. These hoofed flightless birds are adapted for life on the open plains. The heavy beaks are probably not efficient for delicately plucking seeds and bugs like an ostrich, so perhaps these creatures chop grass or crunch bones.

Drawing Xanadu

Xanadu is an island empire on the Squawk world Peleg. The culture of Xanadu is modeled after asian countries such as China and Japan. This drawing was a sketch for a 3D Squawk game we started to develop set in Xanadu. The linear perspective and very limited use of atmospheric depth is more in the tradition of european art than asian art and the clash is akward.

This is a quick sketch for a 2D Squawk game we are beginning to develop. Vertical exaggeration, atmospheric perspective, and orthographic perspective (parallel lines look parallel in the image) give the scene the look of a Chinese ink painting, and lend themselves naturally to a 2D game engine.

The small garden shows how the game might be different from a painting. In a painting the left and right sides of the fence would be at an angle, making it difficult to sort out whether the fence should be drawn in front of or behind each character. In this design the sides of the fence are vertical to make sorting simpler.

This sketch was drawn over and around printed text, which I removed using the GIMP's select-by-color tool, deselecting the parts I didn't want removed, growing the selection by one pixel, and clearing the selected area. If you look closely you can still see the holes where the text was.

This is another sketch for the Squawk 2D game. Four of the five intelligent species of Xanadu (Minotaur, Titan, Kobold, and Gargoyle), a theropod dinosaur ("lyndwyrm") and a sauropod ("behemoth") are shown in size comparison. The interior is shown with orthographic perspective typical of Japanese woodblock prints, and the exterior is shown in a simplified orthographic perspective like the garden above.

Here's a small wooden building with a different type of orthographic perspective, similar to the game Diablo. In a game, this image would be difficult to sort, so it would probably be broken down into parts which would be sorted seperately.

This tower was looking pretty good until I ran out of space at the top :-) The eight sides of the tower are inspired by Chinese pagodas, but also might represent the eight elements of Xanadu's alchemy tradition: water, wood, earth, metal, fire, lightning, air and shadow, or the eight legs of the giant spiders which produce bulletproof spider-silk, the empire's most important product.
I tried to create a more alien style of architecture in this drawing. It's one of my favorites.

Do U Has Basilisk?

Sometimes my drawings just don't come out like I plan.

This drawing shows some anatomical details, such as teeth, posture, hips, muscles, and ribs which are hidden in many other Basilisk drawings.

The addition of clothing made this Basilisk a little too anthropomorphic. Notice that the sandals only support the toes and ball of the foot. I gave this Basilisk toe-less socks but Basilisks are runners who might have blunt claws like an ostrich, so they could wear full socks and even shoes with toes.

Here's what the primitive ancestors of the Basilisk might have looked like, and a reconstruction of psittacosaurus with the newly discovered "quills" which are similar to the Basilisk's spines, but longer but have only been found on part of the tail. Notice the similar structures on an iguana (but also notice how the iguana's scales are very different. Overlapping scales like the onese on the iguana's arms - typical of snakes and lizards - have not been found on dinosaurs.) Speaking of Psittacosaurus, Mark Witton has good reasons to think ceratopsians ate more than just vegetables.

The Right to Keep and Arm Bears

In the last 24 hours I've scanned in more than 300 of my old drawings. This one reminds me of a Panserbjørne from the His Dark Materials trilogy - although it was drawn before I'd heard of that series. Speaking of which, the movie is coming out in December!

This saddled ornithomimid dinosaur was drawn with mechanical pencil on lined paper, then colored with colored pencils. To remove the blue lines, I first created a new transparent layer. I used the "divide" blend mode, and copied and pasted a slice of the lines from the original image into the new layer. Then I copied and pasted that slice over and over to cover all of the lines.

Here's some of my favorite Squawk drawings from the last few days of scanning: