Dinosaur Day - Stan the Stegosaurus

(These posts would come faster and easier if I wasn't such a research purist. To look more professional, I wanted to avoid wikipedia or any books with 'Extreme' or 'Awesome' in its title. Ah well.)

Stan the Stegosaurus



Stan is an adventurous little guy, which is why he has a pith helmet, and that shirt, and that canteen. He likes exploring the melting pot of time periods that is this cartoon dinosaur universe he lives in with his best friend, Terry the Triceratops.

His favourite type of food is garden salads.

Stegosaurus Armatus

When people usually talk about Stegosaurus, they probably mean this guy.

Stegosaurs were large herbivorous dinosaurs, and roamed around during the late Jurassic. They were about 9 metres long, and supposedly could reach three or some odd tons.

The most interesting feature that I and many grade schoolers doing reports on dinosaurs find are its plates and tails. Speculation on the plate’s uses have ranged from armour, communication, cooling system, or mating signal. Or other display signal. Maybe like those neck-fans and frills some lizards have.

They also have a large canal-type deal on their back - some think there was a second brain there to help with reaction time, while others suspect it is... a gland of some sort, I’m not sure and I don’t want to copy+paste off a website to sound like it.

That spiky tail at the end was probably used for defense, and yeah, I imagine it would hurt quite a bit to get smacked by it. Also, apparently some scientists actually refer to it as a Thagomizer! Score another point for Gary Larson! [/old news]

I will include development sketches for this Stan character at a later date. For now, enjoy his vector image and be amazed. Also thankful that I am not going into extreme detail about how I drew him for a cereal box. I did that enough over here.

Sources

(Will add when I am not halfway out the door. Hello, graduate event!)

I am either terribly rusty at this 'research' thing, or it is too hard to find information that does not look like it came off a site built in '99.

Yup! If all goes well, hopefully I will have another post like this next week. But better.

Best Class Ever

First post!
And that is the first and last time I will do that on the internet, let me tell you (unless I forget about this in a few hours, which, y'know...)

So, yes, this is me:



And I draw stuff. Right now, my favourite post-worthy bit of art is this little guy:



The assignment was to create a mascot for a new brand of cereal. After my group struggled with a theme and a title, we started playing with cereal types, landed on 'O's, and then got Phar-O's, which was neat, and we almost went with that because Ancient Egypt is cool, until I stopped and said "Dinos? Din-O's? Hey, kids still like Dinosaurs, right?"

So, we hit upon the perfect theme. Din-O's is sort of narrow, in that it limits our mascots to dinosaurs, but varied because there are tons of different species to choose from.

I wanted to do something popular and recognizable, but not the T.Rex. Much as I love that guy, he's a little overdone. Also, since this was intended for young children, I, er, wanted something that was cool but not like, carnivorous-scary. So I went with a stegosaurus - he's a herbivore, so he's nice, but he's still cool because he has spikes on his tail and he fights things with it.

I started picturing what kind of wacky ads he could be involved in, and most of them involved exploring jungles in search of cereal and stuff. So, off the top of my head, I thought of what 'explorer' outfits usually constituted in my younger days, and avoided copying Indiana Jones somehow. I also clothed him so there would be more variation and interesting stuff in his design. Also why I gave him that helmet, specifically, since without it his head was bald and bare, and even if I did differ from how real Stegosaurs looked and gave him head-spikes, that would make him look a little too punkish, y'know? So I gave him a pith helmet. Tadah!

I had to angle him a little so you could see his tail as well, since without it he could have just as easily been a turtle or tortoise. I made him green because that's the first colour that comes to mind when I think 'reptile' and to a lesser degree, 'jungle'. Also I watched Land Before Time when I was little. A lot.


... I kind of think he's cute. I might draw more like him.