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.