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paleoillustration:

Mauricio Antón talks about his process:

“Outside in”

“Ever since the times of Georges Cuvier, the reconstruction of fossil vertebrates is known as a process that proceeds “from the inside out”, as we first draw the skeleton and then add succesive layers of soft tissue until we finish with the skin and fur. But, as I prepared my reconstructions of sabertooths, I also did the opposite exercise: to draw extant animals “from the outisde in”. What is the point? Well, it is easy to get the wrong mental picture of how the bones of an animal fit inside its body. One may naively imagine that bones are broadly in the center of the mass of soft tissue, but the relationship between the skeleton and the outline of the living animal is more complex, with bone coming quite close to the surface in some particular places (which the classic anatomists knew as “bone points”), while it is hidden under deep layers of flesh in other parts. In order to get used to the correct arrangement of flesh over bone, I did dozens of drawings of modern cats with their skeletons inside. I simply traced the outlines of big cats from photographs (many of them taken at the Madrid zoo), and then using as reference the positions of the “bone points” as illustrated in anatomy manuals, I drew the bones inside the soft tissue “envelope”. After a while the exercise gets easier and more fun -it is relatively simple to pinpoint the ankle, knee or elbow of the animal and place there the corresponding parts of the skeleton (calcaneum, patella, olecranon…) and so on, and then putting the rest of the skeleton in place. And then some things kept surpising me, for instance how far the nasal opening of the skull is behind the external nose of the animal…

Some of these sketches were done almost 20 years ago! Ever since then, I have had the opportunity to make many dissections and CT Scans of big cats, which have allowed me to refine interpretations of bone-to-soft-tissue relationships, but to this day I find that “bone-point” sketching is an enormously useful exercise, and one that you can do with the simplest of tools!”

(via theolduvaigorge)

Filed under art illustration paleontology

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yudiart:

Just as a reference, my whole Gender Reversed Fairy Tale Series together (at last)!

Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Tarzana and John, Little Red Cap, Snow White, Beau and the Beast, The Little Merman, and Cinderfella.

All silkscreens. 6 - 10 colors.  Editions of 20 and 30.  Yudi Chen 2012.  

(via ktshy)

Filed under fairy tale illustration

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theolduvaigorge:

Sabertooth diaries 1: excavating old sketches by Mauricio Antón

“As the publication of my book  ”Sabertooth” comes closer, I am trying to put some order in the mass of material I have been working with during the last few years. It is interesting to leaf through those fat folders full of sketches, some of them dating from MANY years ago: it refreshes my memory about some of the main subjects I have dealt with in the book, and in fact, it motivates me to tackle some of these subjects again, in anticipation for the next book (title to be disclosed at some point in the future…).

Here are some of those “paleo-sketches” (in the whole sense of the word!). They date from more than 15 years ago (Gosh!) and were  my early attempts to put together observations about key aspects of big cat anatomy, especially related to hunting…(these drawings do not appear in the book or anywhere else  in this form, so this is a sort of exclusive…)

In the years after I did these sketches I have found many fascinating things about these aspects of felid anatomy, which I have tried to reflect in the new book. These days I am preparing a short video about some of these things, I expect to be posting it soon!”

  • First image: “compares the “primitive” skeletal porportions of the early cat Pseudaelurus (left) with those of the very different cheetah (Acinonyx) and sabertooth (Smilodon). Obviously, the skeletons and cats are not shown to scale”
  • Second image: “shows aspects of the anatomy of the cheetah, with special attention to the lumbar vertebrae.  For the fun of it, I also included a body size comparison betwen the modern cheetah and the extinct species Acinonyx pardinensis.  Back then I was already puzzled by the possible meaning of the changes in body proportions during the evolution of sabertooths, and in particular in the shortening of the lumbar vertebra in many species”
  • Third image: “shows the sequence of events during a hypothetical hunt by the sabertooth Smilodon: the chase (top); the wrestling struggle (middle); and the killing bite (bottom)”
  • Fourth image: “shows the crucial point when the cat attempts to pull a large prey down to the ground, and it highlights some of the muscles relevant for that action”

(Image and text source: Chasing Sabretooths; via @Laelaps on Twitter)

Filed under illustration science awesome