Dinosaurs

Meanwhile, on Isla Sorna by Walter-Vermeij

Dinosaurs are objectively fucking awesome. This interest in dinosaurs followed not too long after my love for animals sometime in elementary school. I happen to have a very strong positive bias towards lizards (i think they're neat), and dinosaurs are essentially really fucking cool lizards. Above is an artwork (not by me) featuring two of my favorite dinosaurs: Ceratosaurus and Stegosaurus.

Therizinosaurus Horridus Dossier

2024, graphite pencil and micron pen on paper bound together with black thread

The "horrible scythe lizard", Therizinosaurus Horridus proves to be a vicious beast. The addition of cassowary DNA to the genome has made Horridus much more aggressive and territorial than its base genome was believed to be. Even worse, falcon DNA gave Horridus a tooth-like structure on its beak and a newly developed taste for meat, making the once herbivorous Therizinosaurus now omnivorous. It would now actively stalk and hunt down prey and make quick work of them with its massive claws.

Following the Ceratosaurus Diablus comic (I go into more detail about it below), I wanted to do another horror dinosaur themed art piece. After my studio drawing teacher did a lecture on "freaky" logic, I got the idea about how to make a dinosaur more horrifying which eventually led this dossier. Therizinosaurus is such an interesting dinosaur as it is a therapod (bipdeal carnivorous dinosaurs) but as it has invested so much into its claws, Therizinosaurus became an herbivore instead.

Ceratosaurus Diablus Comic

WARNING: Blood & Gore depicting in gray scale

2024, India ink and pen nib on paper

A four page comic following a man exploring an abandoned laboratory to extract some crucial data from a computer room. Little does he know, he is not alone as he is in the company of Ceratosaurus Diablus, the "horned lizard devil". Try as he might, he was unable to escape the jaws of the demon.

This assignment was very open-ended as the only restrictions were it had to be four pages and one of the pages had to have a democratic set up (all the panels on the page are the same size). Since I was assigned this in October close-ish to Halloween, I decided to make a dinosaur horror comic as Jurassic Word: Chaos Theory had realized not too long ago. While I did not watch the show, I did look at plenty of the show's concept art and wanted to do a piece about my favorite dinosaur, the Ceratosaurus. Since this is a fiction piece, Ceratosaurus Diablus has many differences from its real-life counterpart because "creative liberties" (aka it's my comic, I can do whatever the fuck I want).

Skoonametrodon Redesign

2024, digital drawing on Procreate

This is fan art, sorta. Long story short, I picked up a Pokémon Go type game called Jurassic World Alive with one of the main reasons I came back being a hybrid dinosaur called Tyrannometrodon (affectionately dubbed T-Met, Devourer of Worlds as it was a strong member on my team). T-Met (left) got a hybrid with another dinosaur Skoonasaurus (right) and I was excited since one of my favorite creatures in the game is going to become stronger.

That was until I saw its design, where I learned that Skoonametrodon had genuinely the laziest design of all time. Using the T-Rex frame, all they added was the stupid head lump from Skoonasaurus, not (THE MOST PROMINENT FEATURE OF TYRANNOMETRODON). If it at least had the sail, the design wouldn't be complete dogshit, but no. That's too much effort I guess.

What's even worse is scrapped concept art that basically nailed the design, incorporating the sail of T-Met and the spiky osteoderms seen on Skoonasaurus. Since there was a pretty decent design of Skoonamet, I used it for reference and for the colors. I did keep its head bumps and made them stand out, but at least it was in addition to more notable features.

Fake AI T-Rex

2024, digital drawing on Procreate

Generative AI? Cringe. My first assignment for my New Media: Crash Course was to give an mini artist's talk presentation BUT the caveat is we had to include an image generated by AI and see if people could discern which piece was AI generated. My teacher also included an alternative where we could create an artwork that looks by it was AI generated but was actually made by a person. I opted for the later as AI generated images are dogshit, but also because it would be really obvious. In order to make it believable, I did have to generate some images using AI, specifically Stable Diffusion. Holy hell was it diifcult to get anything that I like. Almost all the results generated extra legs (see below image), and this shit is supposed to replace human artists? All the images of Tyrannosaurus Rex on the internet and yet it still gets the number of legs wrong! Not to mention the wrong number of fingers!

The above image was generated using Stable Diffusion