Anomalocaris canadensis Part Two: Revised Sketch

I lost more than twenty percent of my body weight overnight! Ask me how I did it!

So on the advice of Sam Gon III over at The Anomalocaris Homepage (see my links -- I really, really need to figure out how to do links inside a post but I think that might involve HTML and the very thought makes my blood run cold) I've trimmed down old Anomalocaris and while I was at it I changed the attachment of the fins.

I've got a grim feeling that this is going to make it more difficult to render in Illustrator, which likes nice clean seperate shapes. I may have to render them as seperate shapes, then blend them using color. We'll see...

The fins represent a bit of an issue in that they seem to have been stiff but they were not made of/covered in shell. (Sclerotized is the word for this. Thanks for the new word, Sam!) I can't quite get a mental grip on the texture of them. They weren't soft like a squid or a nudibranch, they weren't hard like an arthropod... I wish I knew more about the textures of invertebrates. I should spend an afternoon fondling creeping things.

But the tail was sclerotized (I'm assuming the word comes from sclerotin, which is the hard part of an arthropod's armor as contrasted with chitin which is flexible and forms the joints -- and is also the structural material in mushrooms. I wonder if the taste of seafood-flavored mushrooms like oyster or lobster mushrooms has anything to do with this?) so I can think of it as being something like the tail of a prawn.

Now it's back to the novel.