Where do you find references for your skull and skeletal drawings? It’s clear that there’s a fair bit of research going into making each one, but I’ve always struggled to find good photo material for skeletons. For instance, I looked up “raccoon dog skeleton” once because I couldn’t tell where the fluff ended and the creature began, and the only image I could find was… let’s say it was clearly made by someone who assembled the skeleton without having ever seen a living raccoon dog. (They made it plantigrade lmao) I know you did an Uth Duna skull and that monster is inspired by the infuriatingly under-researched arapaima so I don’t know where you get your hands on anything solid for cases like that
I often visit joelsartore.com for references of the outsides of animals if you’re in need of that (sending this ask again because Tumblr is being Tumblr sorry if you receive it twice)
Thanks for making me aware of joelsartore.com, because those high quality photos will definitely come in art handy.
So for anatomical references I’ve got a lot of ways.
First off is my own digital backlog. If I see anything remotely useful I save it, so on my tablet I have a photo album of over 2,500 pictures of skulls, skeletals, muscle systems, and organs. I also collect a few bones myself irl. I’ve got a ball python, snapping turtle, bird, and bison skulls. Some snake vertebrae and ribs, an anole that petrified in the sun and is a mummy, a turtle shell, most of a dear skull, and a few diaphonized specimens.
For looking for stuff online, first off I avoid pterosaur heresies and reptile evolution because David Peters is a big source of misinformation. I think I used something of his for reference once because there truly was nothing else available.
When determining what references I need I usually try to determine what I personally think a creature is phylogenetically and see what relatives I can pull anatomy stuff from as well as any other relevant animals. For cranial anatomy I usually google “____ skull labeled” or “____ skull anatomy” and usually there’s something with sutures showing or labeled stuff. But sometimes there isn’t and so things get tricky, and this is especially bad for poorly researched or understood groups of animals like primitive mammals or various fish. So there has been a few times when I spent hours with a list of bones something should have and trying to sketch out an educated guess as to where sutures go.
For skulls and skeletals of mammals and dinosaurs it’s actually pretty easy to find most of what you need, although a lot of dinosaur skeletal diagrams don’t include the braincase so I have to search the skull separately.
Keep in mind that often times I have to look for images in research papers.
I actually prefer 3d models above all else if available. Manuel F. Cedeño on Artstation made an in depth labeled Tyrannosaurus skull which is a godsend. Blackburn Lab on sketchfab is a godsend too since they have almost 350 models of ct scanned animals and a few labeled skulls. Ivanbel on deviantart has a bunch of skeletals and skull models of non-mammalian synapsids and other pre-Mesozoic animals.
Of course if I make enough stuff for a group of creatures then I can just use my own art as reference (and I’m cool with people using a lot of my more modern stuff too as reference as long as I’m credited). For instance my tigrex, akantor, and khezu skulls give me a good enough idea of how I should do flying wyvern anatomy that I can just use them. Similar situation with elder dragons. For flying and bird wyverns, since I believe they’re paraves I primarily used deinonychus for their cranial anatomy along with a little T. rex for robustness, and velociraptor and utahraptor for skeletals.
For elders I actually have a “basic ancestral Polypterygian elder” skull I use as reference, which is itself based off a labeled coelacanth skull from a research paper studying their mouth gape and how the intracranial joint affects that. Uth Duna specifically was made using the same references I do for elders, so that aforementioned basal skull I made. I only used arapaima for texture reference and various other fish for how the gills are set up.
Of course it’s nice to know how things move as well, and at least for prehistoric creatures the YouTube channel Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong illustrates this wonderfully with a fun scrapbook art style. It’s also just a fun show that’s very informative on the anatomy and history of study on various dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
Overall you kind of just have to google a bunch of stuff to get good anatomical references, as well as spending hours researching skeletal systems and how they work for different animals.
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