Deinonychus Drawing

Check it out!

Deinonychus antirrhopus

Just finished this about a week ago. MAN was this quite an undertaking! Yes, I drew this entire thing by hand, without tracing anything!. I used an image by Scott Hartman as my guide, and while I struggled a bit keeping the proportions correct (the limbs in particular seem out of proportion compared to Hartman's), I feel like a got pretty close. Not bad for my first attempt at a full skeleton! I've drawn a feel skulls reference museum photos that I think also turned out pretty well, and I would have done that with this drawing as well, but being my first try, I wanted the clearer delineation that would come with copying someone else's drawing. Never mind the numbers and things scribbled on the paper. Those were for my own reference, and don't really mean anything anatomically.



Here's a couple in-progress pictures:

How I did it

I angsted for a while over whether or not to go over my pencil lines with ink.

Obviously I did in the end. If I decide I don't like it, then I guess that'll just

force me to try again! 

a

Clothespin Pterosaur!

So my wife was making some crafts the other day, and I wandered in and starting annoying her, so she made me do a project. And here's the result!

A nice little Quetzalcoatlus! Or Hatzegopteryx.

Whichever strikes your fancy.

Quite a servicable pterosaur if I do say so myself! I took a few photos of the process if you'd like to make one yourself and need to see it step-by-step. The only things I used were clothespins and a hot glue gun. Feel free to edit this process in any way you see fit. If you change the manner of attaching the pieces together, make sure the glue or whatever you use is relatively strong. You don't your pterosaur to collapse on itself!
Now on to the assembly. First the head:

First: disassemle a clothespin...

 ... and then reasseble it with the pieces reveresed. The spring will keep these

pieces together; I didn't glue them so that I could still open the mouth. :)

The spring also serves nicely as the eyes.

Next the body:

I skipped ahead a bit with this step; sorry, no pictures of earlier in the process.

Glue the neck to the head in the indent in the clothespin. Note that the neck attaches

to the body via a half of a clothespin that I snapped into a further half. The body is

constructed in the same manner as the head, but without the metal spring. Attach two

clothespins at a sharp angle at the back of the body for the legs, with most of the thinner

part attached to the body as shown.

And finally, the wings:

Attach the thick end of two halves of a clothespin at a very slight angle.

At this point, the body should be sloping backwards, and the arms should

appear longer than the legs.

For the second half of the wings, glue two clothespin halves together as shown.

Fun Fact: this part of a pterosaur wing is actually an elongated 4th finger!

The part that corresponds to our arms is the part you attached to the body in the

previous step.

 Attach the thickest part of the finger section of the wing to the arms.

Another Fun Fact: Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan the size of a small Cessna!

And there you go! Your very own miniature giant Azhdarchid pterosaur! As I look at it now, the proportion might have been more accurate if I'd used two clothespins for the arms rather than one, but oh well. Like I said, if anything isn't working for you, feel free to expirement as you see fit.

If you want  your pterosaur as a skeleton, leave it as is. For an additional bit of flair, you can suggest a more fleshed out creature by experimenting with attaching cloth or something to the wing bones to more fully represent the wings. Whatever you do, have fun! 

EDIT:
I realized some people may want to have a reference for what these things looked like in real life, so I'm including a picture below.

Resurrection!

So, this blog kinda died before it ever even took off. I don't think I've even looked at it in the last two years!
I'll go ahead and leave the last few posts here for posterity's sake, in case I want to laugh at my old college self. In the meantime, let's see if I can't make something worthwhile out of this thing!

For starters, I'll go ahead and post some links to some of my favorite time-wasters: webcomics!

Of course one has to mention xkcd when talking about webcomics. It requires a real Renaissance Man to understand every single comic, but though it may occasionally sail over your head, it's always entertaining, and often oddly informative!

Wondermark is an absurd comic created from images cobbled together from images taken out of old (pre-1900's?) publications. It kinda reminds me of the silly old pictures they put on the sides of the grocery bags at Trader Joe's.

If you're a gaming nerd, Katie Tiedrich of Awkward Zombie has you covered. Probably not all that entertaining to someone who wouldn't get the references, but an absolute riot to anyone who grew up with a Nintendo!

 If you are more of a history & literature buff (and don't mind some random absurdist stuff in between), then Hark! A Vagrant is for you. Even if some of the jokes sail over your head though, the author Kate Beaton is usually kind enough to explain it to you below the panels.

The Abominable Charles Christopher is about a dimwitted yeti named Charles Christopher and the assorted woodlands residents he meets throughout his bumbling travels. Generally silly, always sweet, and sometimes just a little bit sad, this is one of the more endearing webcomics you'll find out there.

If you're looking for more of a frenetic, fast-paced adventure, the crew of the Lackadaisy speakeasy delivers! Featuring cartoon cats smuggling spirits during the Prohibition Era, I would compare this webcomic to Disney's Robin Hood.

That's all for now! There's several more comics I'm following that are really good, but webcomics have a frustrating habit of going on permanent "hiatus" right in the middle of a story, so I've picked comics that are either weekly non-story-focused comics or stories written by authors who seem dedicated enough to not just up and leave the comic.