Yes, astonishingly enough, not only is Pangaea posting new artwork, but he’s started another thread for it!
Those of you who have been on the GOF a while may already be familiar with the personalized illustrated cards I have made as star day gifts for some members. What you may not know is that I have been making similar cards as gifts for friends and relatives for many years previously, and continue to do so outside the GOF today.
Though I don’t make so many star day cards anymore, I have always intended to compile them all in a single thread, so that they may be easily viewed by both their recipients and any other members who happen to enjoy them. Originally, that location was going to be
my main LBT art thread. However, not all of the cards have been strictly LBT-related, and there are so many of them that I wondered if perhaps I should give them their own thread.
Meanwhile, as I continued my long-held tradition of making cards for my family on holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries, I had entered a new era of card art (beginning in Christmas 2010, and really taking off in May 2011). I started inventing strange, random creatures for each new card, cards that were becoming more elaborate and meticulously drawn than ever. At the same time, my three siblings (all of whom are also artists who create cards for special occasions) were similarly refining their card art styles. Cards were becoming such prized pieces of artwork in our family that we began collecting them in an album. It may be because of this that I went from viewing my cards as a disjointed collection of unrelated drawings to a cohesive series. Thus was born the universe of the Card Critters, a vast and constantly growing menagerie of diverse beings: some real, some imagined, some based on modern animals, others extinct; some derived from mythology or popular culture, others invented entirely by me. Many of them have become recurring characters, appearing in multiple cards, and the creatures on any one card often interact with each other in random and amusing ways. Eventually, elements of the Card Critter universe began bleeding through into my GOF cards, and I had the idea to make a thread dedicated to my card artwork; mainly the star day cards, but also my non-GOF, non-LBT card universe. I probably won’t be sharing any of the actual cards I’ve made for family members featuring the Card Critters, but there’s a possibility that I’ll share sketches, character concepts, and even mini-projects (e.g., character guides?) related to them.
And just as I prepared a custom signature image for the opening post of my LBT art thread, I thought it fitting to create a special piece of cover art for this one:
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If the image isn't showing up, here's the URL.)[/align]
When designing this title, I was very systematic in selecting characters that I hoped would represent the style of my cards as broadly and indicatively as possible. Those of you who have seen my LBT art thread will probably recognize my
longneck pen that I typically use to write my official artist’s signature, shown here doing exactly that.
The other characters are performing the Card Critters’ typical job: creating the shapes of the letters. For each character, I have provided one or two paragraphs explaining who it is and why I chose it for this title. Hopefully this guide is not so long that most of you will not bother reading it.
C: In late July 2011, I made a birthday card for my youngest brother featuring four small winged serpents with party hats; characters I dubbed “the Party Amphipteres” (pronounced “AM-fih-tare”; a kind of mythological flying snake or legless dragon). They have since become perhaps the most iconic of my card critters, having appeared in twenty out of the thirty-two cards I have made since first creating them. They are ideal for cards because they are simple to draw, but also incredibly versatile: their snakelike bodies permit them to be bent into a huge variety of shapes, and the fact that they have wings means that they can be suspended in mid-air anywhere in a picture, even on cards where the law of gravity is meant to be in effect.
So far they have served as stand-ins in for fourteen different letters of the alphabet, and I have imagined how they could form the shapes of the other half of the alphabet as well (both uppercase and lowercase). Someday I’m going to draw a visual amphiptere alphabet showing how this is possible.
Party Amphipteres are never seen without their hats. True to their name, they typically wear party hats, but I have also drawn them in fezzes, Stetsons, Santa Claus hats, fancy feathered hats, horned helmets, and once, a paper bag.
I have a regular cast of ëpteres who make recurring appearances on my cards, and who I usually try to depict with distinct personalities. The one shown here is the de facto leader, the Green Amphiptere (Yeah, I’m still working on names
). I also occasionally “ëptere-ify” characters from other media, caricaturing them as Party Amphipteres. (One of these days I’m going to do this with the LBT gang.
)
a: This colorful little fellow is a trilobite. Known from over 20,000 described species, ranging from about one millimeter to over two feet long, this extinct class of arthropods inhabited the world’s oceans for at least 270 million years. (To see just a hint of their diversity, check out my trilobite fossil photos from my visits to the
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and
Science Museum of Minnesota.) Among the oldest complex animals to evolve on Earth and witnesses to the entire Paleozoic era; beloved among fossil collectors and useful to geologists for determining the age of rock strata; familiar, elegant, and distinctly prehistoric; trilobites are, in my mind, the perfect emblem for paleontology and all things extinct.
Although there are many very cool-looking trilobites out there, those I draw are usually of the generalized, basic-looking variety most people are familiar with, mainly because the more unusual varieties are much harder to draw. Even these generic trilobites are lots of fun, though. I typically like to give them bright colors and interesting patterns, partly because of my fondness for bright hues, but also to make up for the hordes of trilobites I’ve seen illustrated in paleoart with drab, solid color schemes, as if the artists had assumed that the colors of the fossils themselves were indicative of how the living animals were colored.
r: Given that this is cover art for a thread largely dedicated to my LBT-themed cards, I of course had to feature one of the gang in this title. Strangely I went with Ducky, the one whom I have the hardest time drawing. She
is a LBT character I am particularly fond of, however, as well as being the best candidate to stand in for a lowercase letter ër’. I also couldn’t resist the adorable imagery of her encountering the Fluffy Raptor (who, rest assured, is just as surprised by Ducky as she is by him, and poses absolutely no threat to our little swimmer).
d: This little guy is known to me as “the Fluffy Raptor”. Some time ago I learned that dromaeosaurs and other feathered dinosaurs probably had much poofier plumage than they are often depicted with. The Fluffy Raptor was my first attempt at drawing a properly poofed out feathered dinosaur. He’s still not entirely scientifically accurate: he’s not based on any specific species of feathered theropod (though I do remember thinking of
Velociraptor while first designing him); he has unusually tiny forelimbs with only a single visible claw, and I doubt that real-life raptors could hold their tails at a 90? angle like he is doing here. However, by the same virtue, he is an excellent example of how I tend to draw animal characters: fairly realistic, but stylized just enough to make them extra expressive.
I’ve noticed that the Fluffy Raptor seems to get fatter and fluffier every time I draw him.
In his defense, he is deliberately puffing out his feathers here in order to look as round and fluffy as possible, the reason being that he’s spooked by Duckyóbecause, after all, who wouldn’t be? :póand his instinctive response is to make himself look larger and more intimidating (Riiiiight…
). His striped pattern and the red ring around his eye are traits common to many of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs I draw: I’m very fond of putting earth-toned patterns on my fuzzy archosaurs (in the case of raptors I’ve always thought stripes looked particularly good), and for some reason I really like giving my theropods and pterosaurs a colorful ring of skin around the eye, like some birds have.
A: I call this character “The Squid Who Is Inexplicably Wearing Pants”.
I can say without irony that he is one of my proudest creations; even I was surprised by how popular he turned out to be. Whenever he is included in a lineup of my card critters, he is usually one of the first characters people comment on. I love this character not only because he is so hilariously random and is a cephalopod (one of the most spectacular, beautiful, bizarre, and enchanting animal groups ever, in my opinion), but because the story of his origin exemplifies my creative process (or at least one of the paths it sometimes takes) in a way few of my other characters can: It was June or July of 2012; I was rushing to complete a rather elaborate card consisting of over twenty characters. One of the last letters was an ëA’, a letter I have trouble coming up with ideas for at the best of times, and at that point my creative well was running dry. As I struggled to think of a creature that could form the shape of an ëA’, one of my first thoughts was to use a squid or straight-shelled nautiloid, with the tentacles spread apart to form the “legs” of the letter. I was reluctant, however, since I drawn such a character once before, and had not been very satisfied with the result. Sure enough, none of my practice sketches turned out very well, and I decided to turn to something else. I thought of an ëA’ that I had drawn on another card over a year prior; a cartoonish personified version of the actual letter, with a single eye in the center, a conical party hat on top, and a pair of pants covering the “legs”. I didn’t want to reuse that particular character, since I didn’t feel that he suited the tone or style of the card I was making, but I considered possibly revamping the character, or finding some other way to incorporate pants into the letter I was working on. Suddenly, I experienced something akin to an imaginational short circuit: the cephalopod idea, still fresh in my mind, fused with the image of a creature wearing pants, and in an instant, the Squid Who Is Inexplicably Wearing Pants sprang forth fully formed, name and all, into my mind. Instantly all thoughts of further brainstorming evaporated, as I knew I had my letter. Using a tiny but realistic toy squid and a pair of pants as reference, I drew out the character, who turned out to be a hit with both the recipient of the card and everyone else I showed it to. The Squid has returned several times since then; I believe this marks his fifth official appearance.
The pants, by the way, are based on a pair of beige slacks (which are, incidentally, part of the uniform I wear when volunteering at an aquarium), not blue jeans; I colored them blue because it complements the red of the squid so well. The Squid, for his part, has no more idea as to why he is wearing pants than you or anyone else does, myself included.
r: A small dragon, standing on its head. Rotating a character by 90 or 180 degrees is a simple and very handy method for dealing with letters that might otherwise be difficult to represent. For example, a fat frog tilted on its side can become a ëD’, while a dodo balancing on its beak can stand in for a ëP’. Oftentimes, however, I draw characters in unusual positions just because I can.
There’s something I find hilarious and adorable about upside-down characters (maybe that’s one reason I find bats so endearing), and they appear regularly in my cards.
Dragons are among the most common card critters I draw, which probably has a lot to do with sheer freedom of design: although just about everyone has a familiar mental image of the archetypal dragon, there are virtually no rules as to what a dragon should look like. As a result, I revel in creating dragons with unorthodox designs and unique characteristics: furry, mammalian Chinese dragons; rotund wyverns with stubby legs and wings; dragons with sickle-shaped heads, beak-tipped snouts, serrated jaws, sluglike bodies, hook-tipped tails, therizinosaur claws, and spiky beards. And so on. The saw-edged tail of this dragon was inspired by
Pterorhynchus wellnhoferi a pterosaur with a series of flanges running along the top and underside of its tail. I’m guessing that they probably weren’t used to slash at enemies, but it looks cool enough to borrow for one of my critters.
t: Chibis
It was sometime between January and May 2011 when I started drawing chibis (apparently pronounced “CHEE-bee”; a term which I understood at the time to be a style of drawing characters with short, stubby proportions to make them look cutesy). My chibi style typically involves beginning with a rotund body shape, and adding features to it until it satisfactorily resembles the creature or character I have in mind. Chibis usually appear in my cards in groups, stacked or clustered together to form exclamation points and letters like H’s and N’s that are difficult to portray with a single character. I have also been increasingly using them to stand in for squat, rounded lowercase letters such as o’s and a’s. My chibis are usually the smallest characters on a card; they usually end up at around one centimeter (2/5 of an inch) or less in diameter. Recently, however, I have found myself drawing “giant chibis”, similar in shape and other features to my regular chibis, but considerably larger, allowing for more detail. I gave up on counting exactly how many chibi characters I have drawn so far, but I know that it is over four dozen. As for the six chibis I have drawn here, I will be describing them in turn from bottom to top, left to right:
- Derpy: One of my favorite methods of making a card character more comedic or endearingly random is to give it “derp eyes”.
It’s hard to find a card without at least one character sporting misaligned pupils; I’ve put them on everything from dragons, to moths, to platypuses. For this cover, I thought it fair to pay homage to my original inspiration for this stylistic habit: “Derpy Hooves”, the legendary background character from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
- Walrus: For a long time now I have loved using walruses as comedic characters. Not only are they some of the most comical-looking animals out there, but I find “walrus” to be an inherently hilarious word; ideal for inserting into a sentence or phrase, Mad Libs-style, to create an amusing and random mental image. As a result, it’s very easy for me to come up with humorous ways to portray walruses, such as standing on their heads, offering aspirin to Liopleurodon, spontaneously falling from the sky, and, of course, holding buckets. They are the blubbery, tusked, mustached agents of randomness. Thus, when creating a picture intended to be symbolic of my card art, it behooved me to pay tribute to the walrus.
- Alien: Ever since I read Expedition by Wayne Barlowe, I’ve loved drawing alien creatures. Some have been serious attempts at creating plausible alien life forms; others are simply weird creatures that don’t quite fit in with any of my Earth-based characters and therefore become classified as extraterrestrials; a few are completely bizarre, implausible creatures that I envision as hailing from another dimension where the laws of physics are different or absent. I personally find humanoid aliens to be horrendously boring, so when I want to evoke the classic image of an alien; a design that’s original, but instantly recognizable as an alien, I come up with characters like this guy. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my more creative alien designs in the future.
- Viking: I typically draw very few human characters, but in the past year (arguably it began in June 2011, but it really took off in May 2012), an entire world in the Card Critter universe has grown around one exceptional group of them: the Vikings. Before I go on, I feel a disclaimer is in order here: my “Vikings” are pointedly not based on real-life Vikings, who did not wear horned helmets into battle, whose ships usually had sails (or at least oars), and who probably did not have regular encounters with dragons and sea monsters like those that I frequently portray in my cards. At best, they’re my take on the romanticized Vikings of popular culture, my chief sources of inspiration being the Vikings of the online game Ice Breaker (namely the chibiesque design) and the movie How to Train Your Dragon. In a nutshell, my Vikings are a band of slightly sub-sane seafaring glory-seekers (Well, at least the chief is; most of the rest of the crew would rather take a day off from adventuring whenever they had the chance) who regularly run afoul of the monstrous residents of the seas and lands they attempt to conquer. The creatures they meet are seldom aggressive, sometimes mischievous, and always seem to get the better of the Vikings one way or another.
This particular Viking also happens to be a self-portrait, or at least a self-caricature, sporting the same bushy reddish beard and curly “bullhorn sideburns” that I have. As I mentioned before with my Party Amphipteres, sometimes I affectionately caricaturize people and characters from popular media as Card Critters, this being a rather straightforward example (normally the person being caricatured does not remain human ).
- Chicken: In my experience, when you need an easy-to-draw creature to give your picture a booster shot of comedy and/or cuteness, and you don’t have room for a walrus, you can’t go wrong with a fat bird. And one should never underestimate the comic potential of the humble chicken. They make for great “straight
men critters” because they’re so inherently funny that you can draw them pretty much just standing there and it’s amusing. This chicken also exemplifies the unusually vivid color schemes I sometimes give to my card critters (especially deliberately cartoony ones like chibis), sometimes in complete defiance of what would be considered realistic for their species: green bats, blue rabbits, purple brachiopods, etc. (There’s a reason I chose these particular colors for this chicken; I’ll wait to see if anyone gets the joke.)
- White Tent Bat: For as long as I can remember, bats have been some of my favorite animals, so it should come as no surprise that they appear regularly among my card critters. They can be tricky to draw, however, especially when it comes to their wings. (In fact, I don’t think I have yet managed to draw a batóflying or perchingówith accurate wing anatomy.) This is one of my favorite bats to draw: the Honduran white tent bat, arguably one of the most adorable mammals alive (see the first two photos in this post). Not only are they simple to draw, but they’re one of those rare animals that comes pre-chibified, courtesy of evolution. And, like most of my chibis, they naturally tend to be found in clusters, so if I have the patience to draw a lot of them, they’re perfect for forming letters (and as far as I’m concerned, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cuter letter than one consisting entirely of fluffy snuggling bats
). Admittedly, there’s not much that I specifically use bats for on my cards, but I guess you could say that they represent my obsessions; the things I draw simply because I am passionate about them.
To anyone who took the time to read all of this, thank you very much.
And thank you in advance to everyone who chooses to leave comments. I greatly appreciate hearing what people think of my artwork.
EDIT: Uh-oh…did the image turn out too big? Is it stretching the text out too much?
Please let me know if I should upload a smaller version of the picture and create a link to the full-sized version.
