Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkI think this was the first sketch. I was experimenting with a new type of felt-tipped pin that was promised to behave as a brush. It did, largely, and that is why this sketch has such strong black strokes. The paper came for a stack used for polygraphic recordings, which is why it has yellow vertical lines on it. As you can see, the sketch shows an animal with a mane of hair standing in water. It has a somewhat bland expression on its face; perhaps it is wondering what it is doing there. The sketch does not show any underlying pencil lines but was done directly with the pen, which probably explains why the perspective isn't any good. Just look at the lower portion of its jaws: it is almost as if it is twisted to the right compared to the upper part of the head of the animal.
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkI did the same animal again later, this time with a pencil sketch overlaid with a version in blue ballpoint pen. The perspective works better here. The ballpoint pen version shows a smooth neck head shield protruding form the back of the animal's head. I must still have liked the brush-like pen, as I proceeded to go over it once more, this time with the thicker black strokes. The animal is still standing in water and still looks a bit daft, but seems to have a stronger personality than its predecessor. The complex shape of the head was the result of a conscious effort to avoid a typical mammalian head.
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkIt may be difficult to see what is going on here. These are sketches in which I was searching for a pleasing composition. The theme is an animal standing in water, the surface of which is covered with lily-like leaves. The shadows show that the sun is behind the animal, so its shadow projects well before it. The sketch on the lower right is better in this respect, but looking back now I should have emphasized the diagonal nature of the composition.
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkThis one shows the same idea, but the sun is now straight overhead. The lily-like thingies on the water surface are still there, but a new feature are the shadows of 'birds' flying overhead. Some of those are cast on the back of the animal itself. I wonder whether I would have succeeded with this approach: as the birds themselves would not be shown, would anyone be able to work out that those shadows were cast by four winged birds? 'Bird' is used here analogous to 'fish' in the Furahan context. For biological lay people, animal in water are 'fish', and for those people animals that fly are 'birds'. I know better, so do you, but that's how people are.
Obviously, I must have felt that the composition could be improved by just focusing on the head of the animal, as I not only went over the main lines there with a pen, but also divided that section of the sketch into 16 rectangles, a step that helps to redraw a composition in another format. That choice was chosen for the painting.
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkAnd here is the 'marshwallow' again in finished form. In this incarnation it looks irritated. I could easily have omitted all indications that we as humans read as emotional clues, and I probably should have. After all, it is not exactly likely that alien animals would convey emotions in a way that we can read. I probably liked it better this way...
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkLater, I thought about painting a herd of these marshwallows in the middle ground, being stared at by a predator in the foreground. For that I needed to think about a colour pattern. Here are two possible ones. The top one is very mammalian, but the second one is not. The shape of the limbs illustrates what happens if I do not pay a great deal of attention: they turn into mammalian legs. The hind ones especially go against the basic design of large hexapods, in whom the anatomy of the hind legs is -except for the feet- a mirror image of the front pair. In both, there are shoulder blades that are only loosely attached to the bulk of the body. The middle pair has a bone and joint connection to the corporal skeleton. For more on leg design, see previous entries in this blog: here and here.
Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van DijkWhy have just one species of wallow? Indeed, shouldn't there be a group of related species, the 'walloidea'? I thought as much, and here are some. As you can see, there is a 'Protovolvulus species' at the right, in which males and females look the same. The one at the top is a male marshwallow, here called 'Disjecta membra', which means 'with strewn limbs'. The limbs that phrase refers to are not its own, but those of animals dumb enough to bother a marshwallow. In time, the name 'Disjecta membra' was replaced by 'Volvulus elongatus'. Some wallow species tend towards gigantism together with elaborations of the neck shields. Any resemblance with Ceratopsia is not coincidental at all. I have no idea why I came up with the name 'Disjecta pandorae', but to avoid any confusion I would like to stress that this sketch predates the film 'Avatar' by at least 25 years. 'Polyonyx vivax' seems to be the most elaborately coiffed wallow species. By the way, the gender symbols indicate that this how the genders look in the major portion of an animal's life. In most species, sex changes as a function of size and social importance, and 'indicator features' such as spikes on the neck shield change along with sex. It's complicated, I know...
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