AT LAST! After nearly two years of procrastinating, my LBT art thread finally has its third picture.
Mind you, it’s not a new picture (it’s actually even older than the thread itself; the time it took for me to post it was due to me being too lazy to finish writing the description/explanation that goes with it
), though I *have* cleaned it up a bit from the original scan.
This is Siak (pronounced “SEE-ack”), an OC of mine who appears in Caustizer’s LBT fanfiction
Far Away Home. She was created in December 2009, after Caustizer contacted me with the generous offer to create an OC for use in his story. Given my fondness for strange and obscure prehistoric animals, it should come as no surprise that I picked a species that had never appeared in LBT.
Siak is a
Masiakasaurus knopfleri (one of the most confusing-to-pronounce dinosaur names out there; I usually go with “mah-SHEE-ah-kah-SORE-us NOP-flur-eye”), a small theropod dinosaur from the late Cretaceous of Madagascar, most notable for its unusual teeth. Some fish-eating pterosaurs, such as
Rhamphorhynchus, had similar forward-pointing teeth, but
Masiakasaurus was the first dinosaur discovered with this feature. It is widely speculated to have eaten fish, and other small, wriggly creatures. It was an abelisauroid, a member of the same group as
Carnotaurus, though it is estimated to have been only about six or seven feet long.
I’m not very creative with designing original characters in the LBT style, so when drawing Siak, I looked mainly at fast biters for reference. (Obviously the teeth are different, as are the hands and feet;
Masiakasaurus had no sickle claw, and many of its relatives had four fingers.) Otherwise she is mainly based on
a clipart of Masiakasaurus I made years ago (probably in 2003) when I first became interested in the dinosaur, a design which was itself inspired by
my favorite ever picture of Masiakasaurus, done by a paleoartist named Luis V. Rey. The spines and the bronzey green coloration came directly from that painting (I added red stripes because I like a little extra color on my dinosaurs
), as did the protofeathery “vest”, which I removed in the LBT version. For one reason or another, I ended up restricting Siak’s spines to the nape of her neck. I also made them longer and colored them dark red to complement her stripes. I tested out several mixes of bronze and olive green hues before I finally settled on her body color (which, after I scanned it, ended up looking browner than I would have liked). Her pose and expression in the picture are meant to imply nervousness and uncertainty (see her bio below), but unfortunately my level of talent in drawing anything beyond the simplest of expressions and the most static of poses is completely lacking, so I can’t say that I’m completely satisfied how she turned out.
Character-wise, I originally envisioned Siak an outcast among both leafeaters and sharpteeth: the former because of her fierce appearance and the latter because they deemed her weak for only using her extraordinary jaws on fish, refusing to hunt other dinosaurs. I thought of her as being friendly, but timid to the point of cowardliness, preferring to run from threats rather than confronting them, and only using her teeth and claws as an absolute last resort. I imagined she would be easily surprised: whenever she heard a sound behind her while standing by the riverbank, her immediate reaction would be to yelp in fright and dive into the water.
In
Far Away Home, Caustizer wrote Siak as a completely different character: quirky and extroverted, seemingly scatterbrained at times (something of a Cloudcuckoolander), but also extremely maternal and vehemently protective of children. One trait that remained consistent with my original concept of the character was that she couldn’t bear to kill anything bigger or more sentient than a fish. I personally found Caustizer’s portrayal of Siak to be much more interesting and entertaining than the personality I came up with. (Thank you again, Caustizer, if you’re reading this.
)
At the time I made this picture, only a relative few fossil fragments of
Masiakasaurus were known: parts of the lower and upper jaws, some arm and hip bones, several vertebrae, and most of the hind legs. In early 2011, however,
new information on the species was published, including a near-complete reconstruction of the skeleton based on new fossil material. While this is great news for paleontology, it also means that many
Masiakasaurus pictures, including this one, can be considered fairly inaccurate. Siak’s head is too large; her neck too short; her arms too long; her snout should be slightly shorter, deeper, and blunter; and her teeth should be smaller, shorter, more curved, and project less far forward. Truthfully, I knew that the shape of her skull and teeth were less than accurate even at the time I drew them;
I knowingly made the teeth bigger than they should have been becauseólet’s face itóthis
was a caricatured cartoon version of the real
Masiakasaurus, and I wanted to emphasize the species’ most distinctive characteristic. The snout just sort of ended up narrower than I would have liked, and I was reluctant to try to change it because it already looked reasonably good and I doubted that I could make it more realistically proportioned without messing up the rest of the head.
So that’s Artwork #3 for this thread. I still have roughly eighteen to twenty other pictures to share before I’m fully caught up, most of them star day cards I’ve made for various members. Not all of those are strictly LBT-related, so I’ve been debating with myself on whether to start a separate thread for all my star day cards. :unsure:
Well then, assuming there are members out there who find some semblance of visual appeal in my colored pencil cave paintings,
and haven't been put off or bored to sleep by my yammering,
: I'd love to hear your comments.
