I'm taking commissions right now! Prices are dependent on complexity, but generally are within these ranges: Colored character illustration - 200-300 USD Black and white character illustration: 100-150 USD Full illustrations - 500-1000 USD I'm also open to doing creature design, but I'd need to know the specifics of the project to give a quote! Contact: Holly.o.Lucero@gmail.com

I didn't delete it! that post is here . i still read it frequently.

honestly my biggest saddest thought on the trailer itself is I can't tell if it comes off like marvel coded slop to people who don't watch doctor who or if it looks fine (it looks fine to me but i feel like that's probably via exposure therapy to 100 other seasons of doctor who). I hope not?

actual fan brained thoughts:

very charmed that the main alien character in the new pixar movie is a sort of eyeless carnivorous velvet worm

commission for @fearolt!

tweaking the design of these guys a bit. They're a tiny, solitary, sapient alien that evolved to survive in an endless windstorm. I initially imagined them as sea dwelling, but I think they might work well with a setting I've been tossing around, a little planet dominated by oceans of wheat

probably the 456

kennel (prints)

this ask sent me into a 3 day spiral because i can't even think of one. I'm a fake creature design fan.

oh sorry! honestly In this specific case I could preemptively sense that people might, you know, hassle me over reading her stuff😅

drawing a dragon is a high stakes operation that nets you the exact same pedantic comments as dinosaur art but for a totally made up animal

so honestly i really disagree with people saying the original could never work in live action because it looks too cartoony, I think the 2010 design basically looked like a real animal and could work fine in live action. Like a big part of the design appeal here is that this, unlike most pop culture dragons, looks like a creature that could exist; it's something you could translate to live action nearly 1:1 if you wanted to

The issue is less that it's too in line with the original animated design and more that the few new design choices actively work to make it feel less realistic - specifically, the eyes are pushed forward and given "eyebrows" in a way that's clearly meant to be more expressive and humanish, which looks a bit uncanny, and the eyes are a much darker green you don't really see in real animals. honestly I think if they had made it an animatronic just toned down the eyebrows and made the eyes a less vivid green it would basically look fine:

again this isn't me going "they have to make everything look exactly like the original movie or it sucks!", i think that's a kind of poor way to think about adaptation and character design, I just think those original choices are still more in line with what they're stylistically aiming for here.

Honestly I think people are being a bit harsh on them. The big pitfalls I usually see with realistic reimaginings of animated/illustrated creatures is that they either just try to copy the design 1:1, seemingly without a lot of understanding of anatomy/style, or go the opposite direction and treat everything as cartoon exaggeration, toning down or removing features that exist in the real world for the sake of realism. most of these are basically fine on both counts, it looks like the character designers are actually trying to engage with what the original designs are communicating while also not forcing themselves to be 100% fidelic to them. Most of these are not bad designs to me. I will say I 1) don't like the zippleback; maybe it looks better in movement but off the first few images it seems like they just kind of ditched all the interesting (and genuinely reptilian) elements of the original, like it's alligator/lizard-like stance and the way it's spines look like a zipper, in favor of a pretty generic/less visually interesting design:

and 2) I mentioned before I'm really not big on the redesign toothless has throughout the animated movies; the sequels gave him an increasingly flatter, more humanish face with big "eyebrows" and I think it looks way less cute/less like a real animal. the live action design is very obviously referencing this later design and I think it looks pretty rough here too, honestly a bit uncanny valley:

side note: i always thought my harshness on this design choice was a kind of mean hot take but the other day i went into the httyd tumblr tag and man they are so much meaner than me. look at this

i like hide and think it's cute that its janky looking monster is just lost and wants to get home, but a while back i found out that the original pitch was about time lord who had been rotting away in the dimensional woods and wanted to cannibalize the doctor in order to give himself new life and escape

like, oh my god, can you imagine