I don't know exactly what it was about this little guy that I doodled on one of my math pages that stood out to me, but I really wanted to give it a facelift. I've drawn dozens of "dragons" like this in the past, the likes of which will probably be subjects of some future posts -- but today, I present the bat wyvern. 

Keeping with my usual technique of adding spikes, claws and teeth to make it look cooler. And as usual, I didn't give much thought to how it actually worked as a creature, other than it probably lived in a cave, because it's a dragon. Look at those wing claws! They're all over the place!
  

  So naturally, I set to work on making it structurally sound and more practical while maintaining the general form. Well, as practical as a wyvern can be anyway. So, since its clearly a cave dweller, I put it in a cave for starters, and really leaned into the bat elements -- elongated the ears, and gave the wings a more bat-like feel, while still maintaining some ridiculous claws at the end of the fingers. 

I wanted to polish this one up a tad more than my spike devil, so I did. And I really like how it turned out! definitely a pretty standard dragon-thing, but then again, its original design wasn't overly inspired to begin with. Hope ya'all enjoy, and I'll catch you with the next one!

"Bam! That's it!" Was exactly what I said when I got this idea. I've been flip flopping over what to write about, and what I could sustain writing about for some time now. And then, it hit me.

I'm in the unique position in that I have most of my drawings starting from about 10 years old (though there are a few relics even older than that) -- and I'm 32 now. On top of that, I have them all scanned. Earlier this week, I was going through my scan folders and wound up in my early work. And as I was going through, I was struck by an alien that I had drawn:

Pretty standard for my 5th grade doodles, I drew a lot of aliens and monsters covered in spikes with fierce teeth. Basically, the more dangerous it looked, the cooler it looked; so it was pretty standard practice for me to draw something and just cover it with spikes. I also noticed, that though I didn't really understand structure or give much thought to the practicality of this creature's biomechanics at the time -- there was something interesting about its form. And it was workable.

So then, I thought I'd take a crack at it, some 22 or so years later, just for fun. I didn't spend much time on it at all, yet there's something about it that I like quite a bit:

It was really fun trying to figure out how I would actually put this creature together with my current skillset. It ain't perfect, but I was also just having some fun with it. It was also pretty funny to me that I could more or less create this creature on Spore. I may just do that.

Anyhow, I'm glad that I've finally found something to blog about, and hopefully you will find these retrospectives on my past work interesting. I'm really looking forward to the next one!