Anomalocaris Canadensis 4: Full shapes.

Well, nearly full shapes. I need to figure out an approach for the claws/teeth/creepy pointy things on the front grabbers/jaws/things with creepy pointy things all over them. And as an aside, my earlier statement that the tail fins were hardened? It was moon talk.

Here we go with the next state of Anomalocaris. Time to start studying color techniques for Illustrator...

Oh, and the novel seems to be back on track. I'd guess I'm about four to six weeks away from finishing this draft of volume one! Look out -- jump back!

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.

Anomalocaris canadensis Part One: Sketch

And in this corner, the bastard of the Burgess, sixty centimeters of spineless savagery, Anomalocaris canadensis!

Here's the first entry in my next series of prints. The initial goal is to do one animal from each of the main geological periods with the finished prints showing the animals at roughly life-size. I'm starting with the Cambrian but then I'll be jumping to the Permian for a Lycaenops, a yard-long gorgonopsian.

While I do want to do a dinosaur or two, part of the reason for the project is to show off some animals that don't get the same kind of love the dinosaurs do. I might do a simiosaurian from the Triassic... Heck, maybe I should skip dinosaurs entirely. But I want to do a psitticosaurus and a small maniraptor and... Decisions, decisions.

That said, I know there have been a lot of reconstructions of Anomalocaris done over the years. But hey -- what else in the Cambrian is big enough to make a good art print? Huh? Huh?

So now it's time to take this pup into Illustrator and start rendering it. I just hope I'm able to do all the final color rendering in Illustrator but there's a good chance I'll need to do some finishing work in Photoshop as I did with the Pterygotus buffaloensis drawing...