Cenospire Animation

Just a spot to share my art and animation. If you like my stuff, consider checking out my YT at https://youtube.com/@cenospire Certified haver of life since 1999

[cenospire]

Hi folks! Just wanted to thank everyone again for all the support, and also write a brief pinned introduction about myself:

You can call me Ceno (he/him). I'm an Aussie amateur artist and animator who does mostly 2D animated paleoart. I animate frame-by-frame using OpenToonz and paint backgrounds in ArtRage. I'm also a student of tropical ecology (but that's not important).

This blog is a gallery blog specifically for my animations and other complete artworks - if you wanna ask me a question, see WIP or lower-effort content, or otherwise look at my other random stuff I post or reblog, feel free to go to my second blog and check me out there. I tend to keep question-answering posts to a minimum here so head over to my other blog for more of a question free-for-all.

Ceno's Hall of Stuff

Second blog of Cenospire Animation, for stuff of the non-my-art variety. Reblogs and Question answering happens here!

Also, while I want to talk art and only art in this blog, I do want to make one other thing absolutely clear - this blog is a safe space, and bigotry of any kind will absolutely NOT be tolerated.

[cenospire]

'Microraptor and the Nest Guard' - an early-Cretaceous short by me.

I actually made a video documenting my animation process from start to finish for this specific short, so if you're interested, check it out on my YouTube channel!

[best-fictional-snake]

Kipper [Amber Isle] vs. Quetzalcoatlus [CenospireAnimation]

Best Fictional Pterosaur Tournament: Round 1H, Poll 3/8

Kipper [Amber Isle]

Quetzalcoatlus [CenospireAnimation]

Voting ended onFeb 26, 2025

Propaganda (if any) under the cut! Please be civil, and feel free to reblog!

Propaganda for Kipper [Amber Isle]:

"I trust him"

Propaganda for Quetzalcoatlus [CenospireAnimation]:

None submitted.

[cenospire]

Hehehe surprised to see my Quetzalcoatlus mentioned as a contestant, glad he's worthy competition even if he doesn't win

[cenospire]

An exploration of the Middle Cambrian, cradle of the Phanerozoic, in a warm shallow sea just over half a billion years ago.

Music 'Reflections in Stone' thanks once again to the immensely talented @villirefurinn

[cenospire]

Messed around with making a little 'AI-free certified' title sequence to potentially add to future animations, now that such a thing might soon be necessary...

Hope my very amateur guitar fits well enough!

[cenospire]

I was rewatching your latest "storm" animation (again) and I just noticed the sauropods all lower their necks when the thunder rolls. I feel like I'm for sure reading too much into that but was the idea there that they're instinctively avoiding getting struck by lightning??

Ah, I'm glad you noticed! Yeah, that was what I was going for - it of course is totally speculative, but I thought it would be interesting to depict sauropods reacting cautiously to thunder that way.

Funnily enough though, Paludititan probably wouldn't be at significant risk of being struck by lightning, as they were dwarf sauropods that weren't much taller than Hatzegopteryx. But I thought that maybe this speculative behaviour could be ancestral to most sauropods, and Paludititan might possibly retain it despite having shrunk. A fun idea at the very least!

#speculative behaviour

[cenospire]

A storm rolls over Late Cretaceous Hateg island, nourishing the land and drenching the local wildlife. Featuring: Tethyshadros, Hatzegopteryx, Paludititan, Balaur bondoc, an Enantiornithine, Sabresuchus, and many other critters.

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[cenospire]

Very important, sharing for visibility. AI art is theft, and when moneyed interests stand to profit from it, theft quickly becomes the default.

[cenospire]

The sun rises over Dimetrodon as it travels across the landscape of the Middle Permian, spotting Diplocaulus, Titanoptera, a speculative proto-archosauromorph, and Prionosuchus along the way.

The piece 'Morning, when time had no end' was very kindly composed for this animation by the immensely talented Villi-refurinn. Check them out on Bandcamp for more fantastic music!

This one took a lot longer than usual, with life getting in the way and all that. Thank you all sincerely for waiting for so long!

[cenospire]

'Reclaimed' - Just a bit of fun with looping animated backgrounds. Been a bit busy lately and animation is taking longer than it usually does, so I thought I'd post this one up in the meantime - don't worry, more paleoart is still on its way!

This animation is home to 7 little animals (not including the trail of ants)

[cenospire]

how do you handle all the sound design??? im extremely curious

Interesting question! I pretty much always animate first and then do the sound completely at the end. Sometimes I have a specific idea going in of what I want to do with the sound design (like in my spino animation), but my scenes are simple and there usually isn't that much to plan. For the background ambience, I often just go on a hike and use my phone to record some bird and insect noises from the forest, or sometimes I source sounds from iNaturalist if I want something specific. I usually also like to layer a couple of different background ambience recordings over each other to make the scene sound more alive. As for my amateur foley, I do it just by recording myself messing around with random objects - my dino footsteps are me crunching a handful of dried leaves, and the pterosaur beak clacks are from my friend's glasses case for example. It's all recorded on my phone from inside my car, which is the best I've got in terms of audio equipment and sound proofing lol. Hope that answers your question!

[cenospire]

A very curious Pyroraptor spots something interesting (a cycad seed) on the forest floor, and is just...tickled pink by it for some reason.

[cenospire]

Some more paleoart - two pterodactyloid pterosaurs (perhaps Mimodactylus or something similar) play along a forested clifftop during the late Cretaceous. This one took a bit longer than usual, glad to have it finally finished!

[cenospire]

Natovenator polydontus enjoys a sunset swim by the shores of a shallow sea.

Natovenator was a small, semi-aquatic Cretaceous dromaeosaurid discovered in November 2022, whose features imply a potentially similar swimming/diving lifestyle to many modern waterbirds.

Forgot to post this one earlier, so here it is now!

[cenospire]

Welp, I went on a field trip with my university after posting my art here, and once I got back into internet range I find a sudden flooding of so much support and kind words about my art :') I never expected this, and I can't describe how flattered and grateful I am. You all are the best, thank you so much for the support. Animation is slow work but I'm really enjoying making my silly paleoart, so definitely expect much more to be posted here as time goes on!

[cenospire]

My latest complete animation - Spinosaurus goes fishing!

[cenospire]

Cretaceous Characters - Quetzalcoatlus meets a sub-adult triceratops. Just a silly paleoart cartoon thing of mine.