In fact, given my lack of updates on this series, I probably should do a super big one; so here; more than 50% more images than average!
Machairodus, one of the many saber-toothed cats prior to the one everyone knows from California. This one was from Eurasia, North America and Africa of the late Miocene. The North American one was a contender for largest cat who ever lived.
Magnus Robot Fighter, a really cool concept that never really got quite as much traction as it deserved. Although an indie comic book still hangs out there and has for a long time.
Chinese Middle-Late Jurassic; a little earlier than the Morrison of North America, but still showing a broadly similar "aspect." This is an image of the Mamenchisaurus Assemblage in the Junggar Basin with Guanlong and Yinlong in the foreground.
The Columbian Mammoth, which if it had lived just a little bit longer, we'd probably have just called the American Elephant. Remember that mammoths are two things: 1) not necessarily woolly, except for of course the woolly mammoth itself, and 2) more closely related to Asian elephants than even African elephants are. They are very firmly nested as a family member of the modern elephants that we just barely happened to miss. The Columbian mammoths range covered most of what is today the lower 48 and Mexico, and in the southern portions of that range, they're certainly just as tropical as the habitats of elephants today in Africa and Asia.
Sigh. North American megafauna, you have no idea how much I miss you! Although if you were still around, maybe I'd hike and camp less...
A digital model of a Conan style man-ape. Or, in DARK•HERITAGE, a thurse. In many other settings, why not a sasquatch or something too?
This on the other hand, is the batman character Man-bat, which also works as a vampire in his batty morph, I think.
In honor of the soon to launch The Mandalorean show, here's this. It'll probably still suck, because it is, after all, Disney SJW Wars, not Star Wars as it once was, but I can't look away.
Although I probably won't watch it when it's new. I presume it'll get DVD releases eventually, and I'll check it out from my local public library or something.
What can I say? This map makes me laugh. I'd probably actually use this seting, though.
The artist of this barbarian is Polish, so I can maybe suspect that it's not meant to represent one of my specific ancestors. Then again, if you go back far enough, my ancestors in the Corded Ware culture probably spread from this general area, the Nordic Bronze Age went way out into the Baltic territory, and even the Vikings interacted with (and probably intermingled with) plenty of Wends, and even Cnut the Great's mother was probably Polish. The English (and their descendant populations, like the Americans) should probably look at the Poles as kinda long-lost distant cousins rather that completely alien foreigners.
Yes! I could have sworn I've used this before, but it's still in my folder suggesting it hasn't been, so maybe I had another copy under another file name. LOVE this image, though. I love undead.
The same is true for this, but the mining of ... something or other on Mars, is a cool image.
And who doesn't love retrofuturistic 80s style stylized cyberpunk art?
Maul the barbarian? I dunno. This character, along with Boba Fett, was criminally underused and ill-used, for that matter, by George Lucas, and criminally over-used and equally ill-used by subsequent writers.
Another great Warhammer miniature that is begging to be used by other fantasy settings in some way or other; although the combination of little and big arms gives me a kind of D&D glabrezu vibe. I actually built my Typhon daemon stats around the idea of this miniature.
A couple of old-fashioned but still very awesome sci-fi pieces by David Hardy. The latter one was the cover of a book that I used to love at the library, and which I bought used when I saw it sitting at a used book store not too long ago. It was done in late '77 or early '78, I think, and it has some... obvious inspiration involved.
More undead and the necromancers who love them.
Another very 60s/70s style piece of sci-fi art. Man, I loved that era for science fiction sometimes.
I'm not quite sure that making Medusa look sultry and sexy really makes sense; she was supposed to be so ugly that she turned men to stone, and no, I don't mean it like that. Still, not that she isn't a fictional character, obviously, but it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Medusa. Fifth century Greeks started to suggest that maybe she was beautiful as well as terrible and portrayed her less as a monster and more as a victim of the fickleness of the Gods. Herodotus suggests that the myth originated in the Bronze or early Iron Age Berbers of North Africa, and there is a suggestion that it represents a quasi-historical reality; an invasion of Hellenes which profaned the temples of some goddess and stripped her priestesses of their masks (and presumably raped them, or something.)
Either way, while I was initially hesitant to use Medusa, and I'm not quite sure why now, I've since added a great deal of Classical Mythological content to DARK•HERITAGE, and I kinda like the setting with some of that. Medusa is the mother of the medusae, lesser versions, of course, as well as the snakemen, in my setting. I don't have stats for Medusa the original, but medusae are dangerous (and rare) enough.
A Wayne Reynolds Mephistopheles piece from Paizo, although there's a similar one from WotC of the same character also by WAR, curiously, if I remember correctly.
Sigh. If only you could take one of these safaris.
There's a long tradition of making vampires seductive and sexy as well as evil and monstrous, but this one looks more like some kind of inhuman monster raping a woman. Maybe that's a more apt metaphor for the vampire anyway.
A type of D&D bug demon called a mezzoloth, or mezzodaemon, depending on the edition.
Another stylized 80s piece of art. I really love this kind of stuff, but then again, I'm certainly a product from a pop culture perspective, of the 80s. Through and through.
Another weird interesting piece of demon art.
Not sure how this meme got stuck in my regular image folder, and it's certainly a bit out of date now.
Shortly after the Gillette flap, my wife, who does the shopping for our family, replaced my sons' Gillette razors with Schick ones. I already was a Schick user.
I dunno what this means, exactly, but it's a cool image. And everyone loves a hot naked woman.
Speaking of which, here's one of Frazetta's iterations of the Moon Maid cover art. There's actually more than one version of this with somewhat subtle differences, and it's fair to say that it has become one of the artists more iconic illustration; even though the book that it's a cover for is not one of the authors' more iconic works.
Happy Halloween, y'all! I love October. It's my favorite month of the year, actually.
And finally, a Musketeer-type character illustration. A classic swashbuckling archetype of this kind is one of my favorite kinds of characters.
No comments:
Post a Comment