Okayyyy, back to posting art on here!! It’s been a while, but here’s the first piece that I created for @wtf-triassic, the tiny boi dinosauromorph Lagerpeton chanarensis. This small lad hails from the Argentinian Chañares Formation, and is about 235ma old. As a dinosauromorph, Lagerpeton falls just outside the line between dinosaur and non-dinosaur, which is a super abitrary line given how similar some of these species are to “true” dinosaurs. The Chañares Formation is full of other almost-dinosaurs-but-not-quite, making it a fascinating snapshot in time of the very beginnings of the dinosaurian lineage.
As an almost-a-dinosaur, Lagerpeton was probably covered in fluffy filaments, or “protofeathers”, since based on their existence in both dinosaurs and pterosaurs these fibres were likely ancestral at least to ornithodirans, the group that includes pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and vague difficult-to-define little things like Lagerpeton.
There’s not a whole lot special about this reconstruction in particular, I used my usual process for digital painting. I did make more use of textured brushes, which are an excellent way of roughing out textures that I highly recommend experimenting with. I might make a tutorial post on that at some point, it’s something I’ve found extremely useful.
I also chose to make him spotty, since for some reason there aren’t many reconstructions of spotty dinosaurs even though spots are everywhere in the animal kingdom. #bringbackspotsinpalaeoart2020 guys, let’s get that disgustingly-clunky tag trending.