Miscellaneous crafty progress

The raptor skeleton decoration is a souvenir from my birthday field trip. It's a skeleton, so.

Wondering what will be a good way to attach the reflective fabric bone shapes onto the gloves, considering the fabric isn't stretchy, but the gloves are. Maybe I'll get different gloves for this after all.

I'm not going to finish the skeleton gloves today, but that's okay, I'm not making them for halloween (which I don't actually celebrate, as I'm not christian and the trick-or-treat version is not a widespread thing in Finland anyway, I just like the aesthetic). If I get to wear them sometime before spring, I'll be happy.

Forest rust spots

Leafs and a paint stain.

The Wait panels 5 and 6

The comic at my site, and at deviantart.

And two more panels of raptors being cute.

Skye is still a kid, but at the moment her pin feathers do look a bit like Indo's quills, so I guess she was somewhat right (also oh god she used to be tiny).

I hope I didn't make it look like Indo is resting his head on Skye here, it was kind of difficult to convey he's holding his head very close above her back but supporting its weight himself. For reasons including so that Blue can have a drink of rainwater by catching drops that land on his snout.

The next update will include the raptor dinner for which I included a content warning for blood and gore in the first update.

The Wait panel 4

The comic at my site, and at deviantart.

Wings! Which may actually be a bit more functional than I originally assumed, because I'd overlooked that the hand doesn't twist at the wrist but at the elbow, so the remiges (flight feathers) should mostly point in the same direction after all? They're still different from proper raptor wings, though.

Reflective skeleton gloves WIP

Since 'tis the season for all three of

1. gloves
2. wearing something reflective when out after dark to avoid getting run over
3. spoopy scary skeletons

I'm seeing if I can make myself something out of that. All already halloweeny handwear I can find is costume stuff and not actually warm, and idk maybe reflectors aren't as much of a thing where halloween is more of a thing, so I guess it's up to me to do the combining.

The wait begins

I've started posting a new comic to my Jurassic World AU. It's a bit long, and I seem to have a lot to say about each panel (and I want to get to posting it already, though the last panels aren't quite finished yet), so I'm updating it a few panels at a time, rather than uploading it all at once. I'll post commentary on the updates here to avoid cluttering the comic's caption too much.

The comic is here at my site, and here at deviantart, and I'm also posting each update to my Patreon 3 days before making it public. Updates are every 3 days.

Update 1 is panels 1-3, and it's peeling pin feathers time! Someone's about to get her wings and tail fan unwrapped. And a few of the smaller contour feathers that have started appearing on her head and along her spine are ready and peeking out of their wax sheaths, too, since they don't take as long to grow as the big flight feathers do. Good to have someone to help preen open the ones she can't reach - and much safer than having her try to scratch at them herself, risking her accidentally hitting a pin feather that's still in development, as those are still connected to blood vessels and can bleed pretty badly if damaged.

Also, raptor ages. Blue is still quite young no matter how it seems to a yearling. There's not much canon on JP/W raptors' lifespan, but I guess there's also not much the humans know about that in-universe, with how the movies tend to kill off their raptors before they get anywhere near old age. They might be able to live pretty long, though it probably also varies depending on a bunch of things, including which version of JP/W raptor is in question. For what it's worth, there's flightless birds close to their size around today that can live to be as old as sixty (ostriches, that is, and that's in captivity, while in the wild their lifespan is closer to fourty years, but that's still four whole decades).

As for future updates, a content warning in advance: there will be one panel with some blood and gore in the context of carnivorous animals eating another animal they have hunted. Not excessively graphic, but still a bit gross, the kind I've already included elsewhere in my dino gallery. I'll mention it in the update note, and include a warning on the dinoart index page when the panel has been posted.

Indoraptor pigmentation thoughts

Outside of Jurassic World Evolution's AU, how much is there to go on regarding how well the Indoraptor prototype actually represents what would be usual for his species? In terms of colouring, this time.

In a scrapped storyline for Fallen Kingdom, there were going to be two Indoraptors, one of them white. Probably just for visual contrast, but considering the Indominus rex, of which the Indoraptor prototype(s) is a modified clone, is also white, well, maybe Indoraptors and Indominus rexes usually are, and he's just an individual with melanism? Or abundism - a pigmentation variant where an animal's dark markings are very enlargened, resulting in a similar appearance to an animal with melanism, or what looks like partial melanism. The Indominus rex, despite being white with red eyes, is not an albino individual, at least, since she can make herself different colours.

Maybe without the condition the Indoraptor prototype would have had dark horizontal stripes or rows of spots on most of him, and the yellow-gold stripe and the red markings at the corners of his eyes aren't fully covered because there's bigger gaps between dark markings there for brighter display colour markings, while his base colour is something plainer. The JP3 raptors have darker markings in horizontal rows and stripes on a lighter base, on the females at least, while the males have that one brighter stripe along each flank, so that could be where the patterning comes from.

Or that might not be the case, and what we see in the movie is a colouring typical to Indoraptors, but it's fun to wonder about how different Indoraptor individuals might look other than changing the stripe's colour.

Metsään halusin mennä nyt

 

Good and bad monsters

[TW: discussion of abusive relationships, and children and animals being in pain and danger, also mentions of food]
[Spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and some other JP/W media]

Some thoughts on cute raptor comics, because as it happens I've made quite a few of those by now.

I find interesting the occasional strong reactions to my drawing Blue and the Indoraptor from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom getting along and being friendly to each other, and potentially eventually becoming a pair. Sometimes people tell me they find the two dinosaurs interacting amicably weird, because he's a villain and she's a heroine, and that's just a bad ship dynamic all around. Sometimes people seem to like these two together precisely because they fit the villain/heroine ship mold, and after all, what fun is romantic tension without maximum drama.

I feel like both of these people are talking about different characters than the ones I'm drawing, but, I also feel like that's not entirely these people's fault.

Mystery raptor

I came across a feathered raptor figure that I'd never seen before anywhere, and decided it needed a good home. And also I just wanted to have a closer look at wtf it even is.

One more tigerraptor

Well, maybe they're not all that identical, or it could just be that they're my babies so of course I can see a bunch of differences in their designs.

Incidentally, this picture features six dinosaurs

Anyway, I started painting Finder, and good thing I can indeed tell him and his brother apart, since they are at about the same workstage.

Migrating birds

Raptor petting thoughts

[Spoilers for Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]

I didn't actually think of this when I came up with the headcanon for a particular JP/W raptor behavior that I've used in some of my fanworks - pressing the topside of one's head to the underside of another raptor's jaw to feel safe and taken care of (or the other way around to give reassurance of that) - but I guess it's not entirely without basis in canon.

The Jurassic World pack were raised by humans, and I think they consider Owen and Barry their parents, but obviously a lot of instinctual parent-child interactions are more difficult between a parent and child of different species. This is something wildlife conservationists who raise orphaned wild birds have to take into careful consideration, when they're dealing with an imprinting chick that they need to be able to eventually release into the wild, and thus raise as much like a parent bird of the chick's own species would as possible.

And it's amazing. Picture by International Crane Foundation.

But of course the JW raptors were intended to be always kept under human control, so them adapting to interacting with humans was not something to discourage. The humans can't make the noises raptors make to bond with their family, but the raptors understand tones of human speech well enough to pick up on what's meant as calming and soothing and when they're being given directions.

Any physical gestures of affection are difficult to provide once the raptors are big enough they can be dangerous to interact with, but we see Barry petting them and talking to them when they're in their muzzles, and Blue and Delta do seem to welcome it from him - from Hoskins not so much. As it happens, among these calming touches is Barry having his hand on the raptor's head.

Misty

Autodefenestration observation

[Spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]

In references to the fight between Blue and the Indoraptor in Fallen Kingdom, I've seen the Indoraptor falling out of a window getting attributed to Blue causing it, and I've referred to it as her throwing him out the window, myself. But after a closer look, that's not actually what happens: it's very quick and unclear, so it's hard to see especially if you're watching at a theater and can't pause, but turns out he jumps out instead. He just lands in the clumsiest way possible and rolls down the rest of the roof hitting every corner along the way, so not exactly according to plan, but that's what you get when you don't look before you leap.

Beauty and grace, about to fall on his face

But that does make more sense. Blue is trying to keep the Indoraptor in the room, or at least from going after Owen and Maisie, so tossing him in their direction is pretty counterproductive.

I'd figured maybe things got bad enough for her that she had to, and that he hit the window was more of an accident. The only way she could have "thrown" a creature bigger than herself anywhere is by kicking, after all, the same way the Indoraptor sends her flying across the room at one point by kicking her off him, when she gets him vulnerable on his back for a moment. But if this is what happened instead, that makes more sense for the Indoraptor's behavior, too.

The redder end of the leaf spectrum

Making eyes

At the boys, or for the boys. Either way, they both have pupils again.

The orange raptor is the character Elusive, since he has green eyes, and I was going to paint over the figure's chipped and badly placed eyes anyway. Might be that the figure I'll repaint to be Finder, who has yellow eyes but otherwise the same colouring, will need to have its eyes fixed, too, but then I'll just paint more eyes, nbd.

I gave Elusive's eyes a couple of coats of green to cover the old eyes, a bit lighter and warmer at the center, and touched up with orange where the old eye paint had bled to the lower eyelid.

 Grappleclaws' eyes are a bit more complicated, and I did end up painting over them completely instead of preserving the old pupils, since that seemed it would come out neater. He's got a coat of red, another of bright pink at the center, touch-ups to mix the two more gradually, and a stripe of very light yellow at the center. I used cool reds and yellows for the eyes to contrast his colouring otherwise being very warm, and deliberately went a bit over the eyelids to enlargen the eyes a little, since the jumping raptors have kind of small eyes. It's probably because the sculpt seems to be designed for the JP3 raptors, which do have smaller eyes compared to other JP/W raptors. To help the eyes stand out even more, there's also a ring around them of the same black I use for their stripes (mixed with brown, like the white I used on Elusive's underbelly is, too, to have them not be too stark).

Hopefully I'll get to working on some of the girls, too, soon. The Fujimi raptor might become one of them, but speaking of eyes, it actually has really big eyes compared to these figures, so I'll see if I can do something about changing that, or maybe I'll just learn to live with them.

Also, I think I may have fixed the Sinornithosaurus figure's leg? After having it sit on the mold for a week continuously I took it off it, and it's been a day and it hasn't warped back. So that's nice!

Some ruska