Lee
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onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Lee
@onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
170 followers 260 following 400 posts
Lee, 28, Floridian, he/him. Check out cmaidaartworkblog on Tumblr, OnlyScarcelyScaly on Reddit, and Pr0totaxities on Twitter to see my previously-posted artwork while I try to catch up on here
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onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
thanks! It's one of the 7 paintings I have hanging up on my wall, and it's surprisingly small at 11"x14" (maybe I'll make larger prints of it someday). It was a really fun piece to make : )
A very awkwardly angled photo of my painting "Uncertain Landing" on my wall, at right, with my left hand flat against the wall by its bottom left corner for scale, and two larger paintings "Lady Spinosaurus with an Inscisivosaurus" and "Christopher the Regretful and His Youth" to its left further along the wall, all appearing somewhat warped by the severe angle I took this photo from.
December 1, 2025 at 3:43 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
From my actual camera this time, a couple photos from before we left and a couple from the commute. Also, yesterday went just fine, on both fronts
A vertical self portrait cropped from my shirt collar to above my head, taken in the light of a glass door with a dimly lit living room behind me. I am looking down at the camera with my face turned toward right-of-frame, such that my right eye is barely visible. My hair is mostly pinned back except for some loose curls forward of my temples, which fall over the right side of my face just short of my eye. I have dangling gold earrings in both ears (the one on the right ear can be seen peeking from behind my chin), and I'm wearing black mascara and eyeliner, and grey eyeshadow. Another vertical self portrait in front of the glass door, but this time I have turned my head the other way, such that you can see both of my eyes (and *almost* both of my ears), while my chest is still turned toward right-of-frame just as it was previously. My eyes are looking toward left-of-frame, out the door, and I have a mustache on my upper lip and short stubble on my jaw. I'm wearing a black t-shirt with a close collar, and over that a thin, open button-down which is mostly black with large white and tan flowers as its pattern. A self portrait taken in the backseat of a car, with a very similar pose to the previous photo, but now my curls have puffed out a bit and cover my forehead more or less symmetrically, and there's fairly strong, warm lighting from the sun that has just begun to set. My head is turned just a litle more toward left-of-frame this time, and there's a strong shadow on the left side (right-of-frame) of my face and the background beyond it, with my left earring lit up in high contrast against it. A self portrait in the backseat which is not very well lit or framed, but is included only because our dog Laila has shoved her face into the scene from right-of-frame. Her mostly grey muzzle (with a black nose and a white mark on the bridge of her nose) mostly hides my own nose and mouth, we can see her left eye pointed toward the car window to my right (left-of-frame), and her mouth is slightly open as she's panting with excitement at being along for a car ride. She has partial heterochromia in the eye that's visible, being mostly pale blue with a large brown spot taking up the iris's distal quadrant (that is, the part that is closest to the camera now).
November 27, 2025 at 5:01 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Prettied up my eyes again for the first time in a couple months, headed to a family dinner now and our dog (seen here by her tail) is along for the ride. Let's see how that goes on both fronts : )
Vertical self portrait taken with my phone, including my head, left hand, and chest (and Laila's tail) in the backseat of a car. The lighting is mostly even, and im looking slightly down at the camera with darkly but neatly lined and mascara-lashed eyes, with my hair mostly pinned back except for my curled bangs. My hand (with dark gold nails tipped in bluish black) holds my folded glasses, and a gold dangly earring hangs from my lower lobe. Laila's grey slightly flagged tail cuts in from right of frame, just behind my shoulder. A photo similar to previous, but with more severe lighting from the low sun shining through the car window, and my head turnes slightly more oblique. The light forms a wide horizontal stripe that contains my face from my eyebrow to my chin, while my forehead up and most of my neck down are in medium shadow. My upper eyelid has a grey, shimmering shadow applied to it.
November 26, 2025 at 8:38 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
A *liiiitle* late to the party, but not as late as the finished piece will be: corpses of an adult Nanotyrannus and juvenile Tyrannosaurus washed together after a flood, similar in size but anatomically distinct. Very much a work in progress, lmk if anything looks especially disproportionate
Grayscale digital painting on a vertically tall canvas, depicting two Tyrannosaur corpses seen from directly above. They lie on their sides more-or-less facing one another, the Tyrannosaurus juvenile (left) missing its lower jaw, leaving its tongue to flop out onto the ground, and the Nanotyrannus adult (right) missing its right foot and most of the shin. The ground is dark and damp beneath them, shadows casting shortly but sharply leftward, with puddles blurrily reflecting a pale grey sky with pterosaurs wheeling overhead, and various branches and small animal remains scattered around them too. The Tyrannosaurus is generally darker (for now) with haphazard stripes on its tail and flank, and more deliberate feathers and tubercles on its head and neck. The Nanotyrannus has no patterns for now, but has an upward- jutting crest in front of its eyes and larger arms and two-fingered hands than its relative.
November 25, 2025 at 5:01 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Also from February, a Valentine's card for my friend and their partner, featuring Dromaeosaurus and Foraminacephale. Not the *most* plausible behavior, but finding two sympatric genera with even the same first letters as the recipients' names was rough going, and stranger things have happened...
An oil painting on thick white paper of a Dromaeosaurus and Foraminacephale pair, against a soft blue sky and pink field, both facing left. The Dromaeosaurus is a mid-sized maniraptoran seated with its chest raised, feathered arms tucked at its sides, and its head held high and slightly tilted away, with dark green feathers around its head and back of the neck, rich marigold feathers under its jaw down to its underbelly, dark blue on the wings and most of the tail except for a fan of orange at the end, brown on the legs and top of the foot, and the exposed skin around the mouth, eyelids, triangular crest just in front of each eye, and finger and toe pads are aquamarine. The Foraminacephale is a slightly smaller Pachycephalosaur ornithopod sitting in a similar position, leaning on the Dromaeosaurus and situated between it and us, nibbling at the feathers behind its jaw. Its right hand is touching the Dromaeosaurus's left wrist while the other hand hangs down. The back of its arm, flanks, thighs, and tail are mostly dark green, with yellow stripes coming down partway from the ridge of the back and connecting to the hands via the front of the shoulder, and a gradient to olive from the thigh to the foot. The Foraminacephale's head is tan and capped with a grey keratenous round dome, the neck fades between tan and yellow, and the underbelly is a paler duller yellow. The Dromaeosaurus's tail fan is draped over the Foraminacephale's tail, about midway down. Above this painting, pasted to the top flap of the card, is my caption for the illustration, typed and printed in small red text on white paper, which reads: "Dromaeosaurus and Foraminacephale! These two lived about 70 million years ago in what is now the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, and are both Dinosaurs themselves, Dromaeosaurus being a carnivorous Theropod and Foraminacephale being a herbivorous Ornithopod. The individuals seen here are pair bonded, and are taking turns preening one another."
November 19, 2025 at 8:01 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
A video of the Anchiornis card, showing the front cover, the main illustration and text, and then the featherless sketch hidden behind. With the card catching the light variably and being oblique to the camera for some frames, the red nail polish on the head feathers can be seen to sparkle (3/3)
November 17, 2025 at 7:12 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Next, two more cards with two photos each, featuring Anchiornis and Jeholornis (2/3)
An illustration in acrylic paint, marker, and nail polish of Anchiornis, a birdlike dinosaur (or possibly bird) on pink construction paper, and above this, a printout of red text on thin white paper, mounted on thick white paper. The Anchiornis spreads its clawed but otherwise birdlike wings to balance as it alights on a branch, one raptor-like foot making contact before the other. Its tail is raised in the air and its red-crested head points down, and a thin crescent moon looms just behind it alongside scattered tiny clouds and the orange silhouettes of a distant flock of Pterosaurs. Fully covered in feathers, the tiny theropod's body is mostly grey and fluffy, with longer white-and-black flight feathers on its arms, tail, and legs. In red, the accompanying text reads: "Anchiornis! Discovered in Liaoning, China and dating to 160 million years ago, this dinosaur’s fossils are so well preserved that we know the colors of its feathers, by the shapes of its microscopic pigment cells. Some experts had Anchiornis pegged as one of the first birds, while others place it *just before* the split between birds and the “raptor” dinosaurs." The same card as featured previously, but this time with most of the text cropped out of the photo and the color illustration flipped over to reveal a graphite sketch of the Anchiornis in the same position and pose on the other face of the same sheet of pink paper, but now without feathers, revealing a naked, more recognizably dinosaur-looking body. My left hand is holding the card by its left edge. An acrylic painting on a thin pane of plastic, of Jeholornis, an early Cretaceous bird. Above this, a printout of red text on thin white paper, mounted on thick white paper. The painting is rather dark, with the Jeholornis in black India ink with shimmering teal nail polish highlights, standing against an abstract mess of dark green and brown suggesting a forest floor. The Jeholornis stoops over the ground with its clawed wings only partly extended and asymmetrically lifted, its long fan-tipped feathery tail raised toward the upper right corner, and its head turned on a fluffy neck to point downward and show us its blue right eye. In red, the accompanying text reads: "Jeholornis! This early bird lived about 120 million years ago in the Jiufotang Formation, China, and had a similar body plan to many small “non-avian” maniraptorans to which it was distantly related. Fossil evidence points to a diet of seeds and fruits, and is reconstructed here with feathers that are darkly iridescent, a condition which its contemporary relatives Microraptor and Wulong preserve evidence for." The same painting as featured previous, but this time taking up the full horizontal frame of the photo, instead of the bottom half of a vertical photo. It is now also slightly better lit (though still dark), and now we can better see the contrast between the black ink and the green and brown paint. The thin brushstrokes of shimmery teal nailpolish are also more visible now, present most notably on the fan of feathers on the hips projecting back over the base of the tail, and on the larger fan at the tip of the tail. The Jeholornis's face is mostly covered in black feathers but also features grey eyelids, a pair of tiny grey crests in front of its eyes, a raised patch of soft grey skin at the corners of its mouth, and a rounded, hard grey beak at the tip of its snout. On the ends of long skinny legs, the small feet have two adjacent toes which support its weight, one toe bearing a claw that is held up above the others, and one tiny claw further up the arch of the foot. The left foot is planted on the ground, and the right foot is raised just above the ground.
November 17, 2025 at 7:12 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
From February, a couple Paleoart Valentine's Day cards I made for some of my coworkers, these featuring Makhaira, Amargasaurus, and Tylocephale (1/3)
A color pencil drawing on a small piece of white paper, depicting an adult Makhaira (a genus of Pliosaur extinct marine reptile), her offspring about a fifth her size, and a large ammonite floating past a short distance behind them. We see this scene from slightly above the subjects, all casting shadows on the pale pinkish seabed immediately below them. The Makhaira mother and child are both primarily light brown with white underbellies, flipper tips, and stripes on their faces and tails, and are both facing the lower left corner of the image. They have large, vaguely crocodile-like heads on short fat necks, and torpedo-shaped torsos supporting sea-turtle like flippers and a short, finned tail. The mother's underbelly is directly facing the seabed, and her offspring is a little above her head, twisting sideways a bit. The ammonite is likewise seen in profile but is facing somewhat away and to the right, and both its round spiral shell and bouquet of tentacles are darkly colored. Just beyond, the seabed fades away into the blue of the open ocean. Although cropped out of this photo, I still have access to the text that accompanied this illustration, which read: "Makhaira! About 130 million years ago this marine reptile prowled the shallow seas in what would later dry up and become western Russia. Compared to other Pliosaurs, Makhaira’s teeth are uniquely shaped for especially large prey. This one isn’t doing any of that right now though, instead she’s watching over her offspring, which did not hatch from an egg but was live-birthed just like a modern whale calf. an illustration in acrylic paint and marker on pink construction paper of a trio of Amargasaurus sauropod dinosaurs on a barren plain under dark grey clouds, and above this illustration a printout with red text on thin white paper, mounted on thick white paper. The Amargasaurus have grey torsos (in acrylic) with primarily white necks (acrylic) covered in purple, green, and yellow marks (marker), topped by parallel rows of thin black stripes (marker) which anchor into the fleshy sails. One has its back turned to us and its neck arched in the left-hand foreground, another peeks in from the right edge, in profile, turning its neck to present its right cheek to the foreground individual, and another struts from the left edge toward the center, raising its head skyward and flicking its bristly tail, its torso and limbs mostly blocked by the closest one's neck. the ground is pink with white highlights toward the horizon (acrylic) and the sky is likewise pink with a patchwork of dark clouds (acrylic and marker). The text, in an almost-cursive font, reads: Amargasaurus! Living about 125 million years ago in what would become Argentina, Amargasaurus was not especially large for a Sauropod, but it *was* unique for the two parallel rows of bony spines along the back of its neck, up to 2 feet long. In life these spines might have been embedded in muscle and skin to create colorful display structures, but even if they were covered, there may also have been spikes of horn-like material extending from the tips." A drawing in color pencil on pink construction paper of a pair of Tylocephale pachycephalosaur dinosaurs, and above this illustration a printout on thin white paper with red text, mounted on thick white paper. One Tylocephale has its back turned to us in the foreground, presenting us its right shoulder, turning its neck to face its opponent. *That* individual is mostly in-frame except the tip of its tail cropped by the right edge, in a wide-stanced crouch with long legs and short arms, lowering its head toward the first individual. Both have bright green, thickly-domed foreheads fringed by a mess of pale knobby spikes, solid black eyes, short yellow beaks, and round orange-and-brown striped faces, with similar color and pattern on the rest of their bodies save for white feet and underbellies. Mostly covered in tiny scales, there is also a mane of long thin filaments along their spines from the back of their head to the tips of their tails. The text accompanying this illustration, in red, reads: "Tylocephale! The 75 million year old fossils of this dinosaur were discovered in Mongolia, and while its overall body size was about average for a Pachycephalosaur, Tylocephale did possess the tallest bony forehead dome out of all its relatives. These domes are the feature that gave Pachycephalosaurs that name in the first place (literally translating as thick-headed reptiles), making this a particularly impressive superlative."
November 17, 2025 at 7:12 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Something from April that I forgot to share, a Jeholornis spreading its wings under a canopy-filtered sunbeam. Basic armature rendered in Blender, feathers, color, and basic environment done in Photopea, and marker, oil paint, and nail polish applied to the subsequent printout.
A featherless Blender model of the Avalian dinosaur Jeholornis, viewed from above, slightly behind, and slightly to its left, such that we see its spine form a straight line from the upper-left corner to the lower-right corner. It is turning its neck and head to look up and back at us with its left eye, and its featherless wings are raised and extended to either side. Its left foot is planted further behind it, and its right foot, barely visible, is planted further forward. This, in combination with its outspread arms, give the dinosaur a similar pose to a person on a surfboard. A digital painting of the same dinosaur featured in the Blender screenshot, in the same pose, viewpoint, and proportions, but now covered in long brown feathers, including fully birdlike wings (aside from the visible claws), a shaggy mane on its neck, a fan of feathers extending over the base of its tail from the hips, and a larger fan at the tip of its tail. It is standing in front of a perfectly mirror-like puddle with larger theropod footprints on the other side of it, also filled with water, reflecting the forest canopy above with gaps between the treetops, offering glimpses of the sky. A flock of Confuciusornis, flying right-to-left overhead, are also reflected. The ground beneath it is solid, featureless olive green, and the dinosaur's shadow is closely cast onto it. Across the Jeholornis's back and wings, a narrow sunbeam forms a shape similar to a serpentine lake. A photo of a printout of the digital painting featured in the previous image, mounted on a piece of thick white paper that forms a narrow border around it. The once-solid forest floor has been given much more detail and variety by a combination of marker and oil paint. The Jeholornis's shadow has been deepened with marker, as has a patch of solid black feathers on its face forming a mask around the eyes. Narrow patches of bright green oil paint simulate sun highlights on the forest floor, against the areas in shadow, which feature various small ground plants. On the surface of the puddle, a similar patch is created with pale sparkly nail polish. The card seen from a more oblique angle, such that the nail polish applied to the sunbeam highlight on the puddle fluoresces in the real-life light hitting the card, also revealing that the entire silhouette of the Jeholornis has also been covered in the nail polish, simulating crow-like feather iridescence. While the polish on the puddle and the wing-spanning sunbeam glow golden, the majority of the Jeholornis's feathers have a bright teal glint, owing to a different color of nail polish being applied to those.
November 16, 2025 at 9:16 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Quote with your art with horns!
A minimal-palette, digitally-painted portrait of the Ceratopsian dinosaur Pentaceratops, looming in the foreground and pointing its left brow horn at us by facing down and slightly to our left, cocking its head. Its prominent left cheek horn points right-of-frame and slightly upwards, while its opposite, also visible from this angle, points left and slightly down. The background is a flat dark green, which the post-cranial body fades into, while the nearer and better lit portions are a brighter butterscotch color, with strong shadows cast across its midface by the brow horns. all values in this piece are on a gradient between this darker green and brighter butterscotch, such that more medium tones appear olive. There is a thin crease extending backward from the nostril ending where the back of the bony nasal aperture would be, and while most of the skin hasn't been given a texture, there are faint outlines of scales on the very tall frill which are small, elongated, and somewhat rectangle shaped, arranged in parallel formation pointing toward the frill's edge. A painting of a pair of Majungasaurus sitting in front of a steep red sandstone hill set against a blue, lightly cloud-scattered sky. The Majungasaurus have dark grey mottled scaly torsos, tiny red arms, long white shaggy feathers hanging down from their throats and chins and cheeks and around their shoulders, thick wrinkled yellow skin on the backs of their necks that almost appears to sit on top of the feathers like a saddle, small eyes positioned beneath a stubby grey cone on their foreheads, spiky clusters of dull-bown keratin covering the tops of their snouts from the spike-base to between their nostrils, and a loose wrinkly patch of pale pink skin that covers their ateorbital fenestra (midface), slightly overhangs the sides of their closed, tight-lipped mouths, but leaves exposed the nostrils, the blunt rounded front of the mouth, and the black-fringed back corner of the mouth. The Majungasaurus in front is facing the viewer obliquity, looking to the right of frame, and the Majungasaurus just behind that one is seated so we mostly see its hindquarters to the right of the foreground individual, and so its head pokes out, facing the top-left corner of the piece, from behind the foreground individual's neck. The thick back-of-neck skin on the background individual are more red-brown than yellow, but otherwise they are nearly identical, sitting side-by-side facing opposite directions, their torsos at 45 degrees from the ground and their tails (below frame, not visible) presumably flat against the ground. A digital painting of a pair of Arsinoitherium, large extinct mammals with rhinocerous-like bodies and a pair of very large horns projecting forward over their snouts from bases above the eyes. One is resting on the ground facing us, with its hind legs sprawled to one side and its front legs meeting at the paws in front of its chest, its head lifted and tilted slightly left-of-frame with its eyes closed. The other individual, intruding from right-of-frame, is seen in profile as it opens its old-man-looking mouth to make aggravated noises at the resting individual. Both have dark necks and heads with pale marks and splatters around the nostrils, upper lips, and cheeks, dark limbs past the elbows and knees, and mostly pale shoulders and flanks with spatters of darker pigment. Their environment is a patch of mostly bare earth with some shrubs and trees in the middle-distance, under a bright, lightly clouded blue sky. A drawing in red and white colored pencil on a vertically-oriented sheet of black construction paper, divided into top and bottom halves. In the top half is a white pencil sketch of a dragon's full body seen from directly above, its wings stretching out to either edge of the drawing and its snout touching the top edge. there are tics in white pencil along the right edge of the paper, marking length in units too small and blurry to make out. It has a long skinny torso, small hind legs, a long skinny tail with a webbed spiky fin at the tip, a relatively short skinny neck and a proportionally tiny head. Its wingspan is greater than the length of its body, composed of a thicker membrane shaped like a stingray along its flank and extending to the elbows, two free fingers about halfway down the length of the wing, and three very long membrane-bearing fingers comprising the distal half of the wingspan. These fingers are not part of one membrane, but rather look like a trio of Pterosaur wings slightly overlapping at their bases. The lower half of the drawing, meanwhile, features the skull of this creature in profile, facing right-of-frame, in white pencil with a hazy outline of red pencil. A human in black clothes with a white cape stands in the lower right corner, dwarfed by the skull, which has multiple large fenestrae in the snout, back of the jaw, and base of the horns in order to reduce weight and host air-filled organs. It has a sharply pointed chin, tiny eye sockets with scleral rings, a messy assortment of sharp teeth in the upper and lower jaws, and enormous horns extending backwards from the braincase. The skull is mostly black with white highlights informing its texture, and there is a faint grid in white pencil behind it, intersecting the red haze.
November 15, 2025 at 6:55 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Art VS Artist
A digital painting all in shades of grey, depicting a large, oddly shaped therapod Deinocheirus backhanding a much smaller ornithopod Homalocephale off the ground, while another Homalocephe freezes and looks around frantically in the foreground. All these dinosaurs are set against a solid pale grey background, with only their shadows on the ground to suggest that there *is* ground. The Deinocheirus is tall and covered in fluffy short feathers, with large, 3 fingered hands, a dark grey torso with a humped back (such that it looks like a gumdrop on legs from this oblique angle) and a long camel-like neck with pale feathers along most of the back of it trailing toward the hump, dark feathers on the throat, and topped by a long, goose-like head with one tiny eye turned toward us. Its right arm (toward left-of-frame) is the one backhanding the Homalocephale, lifting it off the ground by the speed and force of that blow so that the little dinosaur's tail and back legs point skyward and the flat-topped head is a foot off the ground. Both of the Homalocephale are small and bipedal, with tiny arms, short-ish necks, birdlike legs, and long stiff tails, their bodies mostly scaled but with short bristly feathers on their hips, thighs, and the baseward half of the tail. They are mostly dark but with a paler blotch centered on their shoulders, like a little vest with no straight edges. An oil painting on the top of a square box lid, depicting the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. The sky takes up the top 2/5ths of the frame and is a rich medium blue with very few clouds except down near the pale horizon, and a tiny, partly crescent white dot in the upper right corner represents the moon. The distant horizon is composed of a pale bluish line of trees on the right and left, and a darker, nearer line of trees at the center of the horizon, with pine trees and palm trees. Between the horizon and our position are various overlapping stretches of dull yellow grass and mangrove-shrub-bearing waterways, some small dark stands of palm trees, and more vibrant, variable foliage on the nearest shore to us (about 30 feet away), across a bright blue stretch of water that we appear to be hovering a few meters above. There are a couple white egrets in the middle distance and on the near shore, an alligator poking its head above the water on the near right, and an ibis on the lower left, its hindquarters cropped by the bottom frame, with brown shoulders, a white neck, and a long, curved red beak facing away from us and to the right. A self portrait with one wall of a hallway in background. I take up most of the frame, with my back to its right edge and my face and chest pointed left-of-frame obliquely. my chin is very slightly lifted, and my eyes are almost completely closed. My left ear is visible, and a square opalite earring hangs from it. My dark blonde hair is in a tie high up behind my head but hangs down in long curls to my shoulders. my upper eyelids appear less saturated now, more a dark, teal-grey, but the reddish base of the Duochrome eyeshadow is visible in the fade-out just below my eyebrows.
November 12, 2025 at 9:59 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
If you see this, post your bird art!
An oil painting on the top of a square box lid, depicting a pair of ospreys in a large nest, with a river and trees on the opposite shore in the background behind them. The sky is a cloudless gradient of soft dull blue to a slightly paler horizon, taking up the top half of the painting and slightly overlapped by the ospreys, and the river is a more vibrant turquoise color, running left-to-right but completely covered by the nest on the right half of the painting. The trees and foliage on the opposite shore are a dark olive with some subtle variation. Of the two ospreys, the foreground one stands facing us obliquely and tucks its head leftward to clean its right wing, and the osprey directly behind it is in-profile, facing right-of-frame with its head and chest peeking out from behind the foreground osprey's shoulder.
November 11, 2025 at 1:25 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
got up early enough to cut my hair before going to work, not bad for 15 minutes at a bathroom sink : )
Vertical self portrait with a dark room behind me while I myself am better illuminated, facing the camera more or less directly with my chin slightly raised, and a pile of dark curls covering my forehead and framing my temples. My head casts a shadow on my neck down to my collarbones, I'm looking directly at the camera, and I have stubble on my jaw and a mustache above my lip. Self portrait photo with the same dark room in the background as the last photo, and the same me, but now I'm facing right-of-frame so only the right side of my head is visible, and the lit hallway is also visible in the mirror on the wall behind me. The hair at my temples and the back of my head is tied behind my head, and one lock of hair hangs down the side of my head from the top, while the rest of the loose curls are still hanging over my forehead self portrait photo with a white doorframe at the left edge of the photo, immediately behind my right shoulder, my sternum turned toward the camera, with my neck turned so my head faces left-of-frame. The background is very dark, and the outline of my hair is hard to make out against it since it's still damp (and so a bit darker than the usual dirty-blond) but the curls are much more visible against my skin. My left shoulder is entirely cropped out by the photo's right edge. My ear is uncovered, since all the hair behind and directly above it is tied back. a self portrait photo with a white door opening into the dark room behind me, where my left shoulder is closest to the camera and my right shoulder is pointed away from it into the room, and my neck is craned so I'm able to look over my shoulder. My face is turned mostly to the camera (but slightly to the right) while my eyes point away to the right. As in all the photos in this series, the bright peach straps of my tank top are visible on my shoulders, while the rest of the shirt is cropped out.
September 28, 2025 at 11:14 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
This project has been in the planning stage for a bit now, so it took a little digging to find the work I did for what its face should eventually look like. In the final panorama, this Tyrannosaurus and the foreground will be sculpted in higher relief, and more distant features will be flatter
Two side-by-side portraits of a Tyrannosaurus rex looking up toward the viewer, the one on the right being a pencil drawing on paper, and the left one being an unfinished digital paintover on a photograph of a T. rex skeleton mount, made to resemble the drawing in a more realistic and detailed way. The drawing features the dinosaur's head in detail and the torso represented by one line for the curve of its back, cut off by the right edge of the paper. we see the top of its snout best, both round dark eyes looking up toward us and its lipped mouth slightly open to reveal the front lower teeth. It has blunt keratinous crests behind and in front of its eyes (the hind ones more distal, the front ones more proximal) and on its cheek by the corners of its mouth, and little keratinous spikes on top of its snout. The top of its head and the back of its wrinkly neck are mostly bare (except for some sparse hairlike filaments), there's soft wattle-like skin below and in front of its eyes, and there are patches of feathers around this eyesocket feature and on its jaw beneath the corners of its mouth. In the digital paintover of the reference photo, I've only painted the features anterior to the brow keratin, mostly in greyscale except for the eyes and gums around the bottom teeth, and the areas to be covered in feathers haven't been painted at all, leaving that part of the original photo visible through these gaps. The soft eyesocket skin is in white, the majority of the snout is medium grey (to be covered in small flexible scales eventually), and the harder keratinous features are darker grey.
September 23, 2025 at 3:24 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Also, some quick fly-by footage of the tilted Blender hemisphere, left-to-right and bottom-to-top, to give an idea of how the final physical piece should appear in the round
September 22, 2025 at 10:17 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
The direct photo reference and some of the background work for a physical project I'm starting, which will be a partial panorama (with some bas-relief) set inside a thrifted marble lightshade, depicting a Tyrannosaurus stalking through a burnt forest and noticing us. More info in alt-text.
Photograph of the Tyrannosaurus fossil mount at the UC Berkeley Valley Life Sciences Building, captured by Instagram user @derekderoche. The photo is taken from slightly above the skeleton, such that we see the T.rex's left flank perpendicular to us and its upturned head pointed straight toward us. There is a slight fisheye effect on the photo, such that its head, near the left edge, is lightly warped and magnified. Two horizontal screenshots of Blender workspaces pasted on a square image, one above the other. The top one, without textures, shows my simple digital reconstruction of the Berkeley skeleton at a distance beyond its right flank, its head pointed away from us, with multiple Blender cameras arranged around it which I used to match my sculpture to the dimensions and pose of the mount based on multiple photo references. Below this, with color and shadows, a screenshot of this reconstruction inserted into an environment with a river, a sandbar dividing it, and hilly terrain on either side of it crowded with low-poly branchless trees, casting thin shadows rightward. We see the T.rex asset from a distance in front of it and slightly higher than it, lumbering along the sandbar with its head pointed right-of-frame to look up at the Blender camera (set to match the viewpoint of the original reference photo). In the upper 2/5ths of the image, an equirectangular panorama, and in the lower 3/5ths, the inner face of a shallow hemisphere in Blender with part of the panorama texturing it. The panorama depicts the digitally rendered environment seen in this post's previous image, with the Tryannosaurus asset taking up a small area near the panorama's right edge. The left side of its face is illuminated from slightly behind, and its flank and the right side of its face is mostly shaded, since the sun, casting the forest's shadows as well, is behind it. The left side of the panorama is dominated by the trunk of a tree, which the camera was positioned as if in the branches of. There is a grey haze cast over all this which is strongest in the distance and mostly transparent in the foreground. We see the river stretching in to the distance in both directions. We look down into the inner face of the shallow Blender hemisphere, lika a basin, textured with part of this panorama such that the Tyrannosaurus takes up the center of it, the panorama's Nadir is at the bottom edge, and the panorama's horizon is near the top edge and the more distant trees are not cropped out by it. There is a subtle wireframe applied to show the curve of the "basin" without obscuring the panorama texture. My photograph of the marble (or marbled glass?) hemisphere lightshade that will become the final version of this project. I'm holding it with one hand at an upright angle against a pink cloth, such that its inner face is pointed right-of frame but we can still see inside it. It is about 30cm wide, 10cm deep, with a 4cm hole in its center and a thickness of about 0.8cm. My left hand is mostly obscured by it from this angle, holding onto the outside, with my thumb on the outer rim and the tips of two fingers (maybe my middle and ring?) holding the rim of the aperture through which they are visible. In pencil, I have already marked the horizon, the vertical and horizontal dividing lines, and the near shore of the river, and I've used multiple pieces of clear tape to create a kind of thin barrier along the bottom edge.
September 22, 2025 at 7:24 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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A digitally painted portrait of an orc character of mine I named Yihenaalbrin, whose broad shoulders extend past the piece's edges and are held higher on the right than on the left. Her brown, inward-slanting eyes are held on us as she turns her head slightly to our left and grins, exposing large canine teeth that wouldn't poke out of a closed mouth but still stand out from the rest. She has a strong jaw and cheekbones with a midface that is sunken by comparison featuring a somewhat small nose. the upper part of her nose, the part between the eyes, comes forward a bit along with the center of the eyebrows, the brows themselves being thumbprints of dark hair directly above they eyes. Despite the more angular elements of it her overall face shape is softly rounded. her head of brown hair is short and somewhat shaggy, with a hint of a mane growing down the back of her neck. she has small pointed ears, olive skin that is greener toward the highlights and redder/browner at the shadows, and around the back of her neck is a dark, solid curved rod (threaded with thin chains of copper) that extends forward from both shoulders, from which the front of her white shirt hangs down by narrow straps. Five duplicated closeups of the lower half of the portrait, below the chin, where I rendered alternate concepts for the top she's wearing. First, a flat strap or semi-torus of dark material sitting wide around the back of her neck and almost-meeting above her clavicles, with either end having a short loop of twine that attaches to an overlapping pair of dark turquoise fabric pieces; Next, a hard dark collar that sits high across the back of her neck, partly wraps around the sides of it, and then descends at a right angle down either side of her throat to her clavicles, with a thin band stretched between the parallel ends which suspends a wide dark apron of cloth; A flat torus of grey leather that goes wide around her shoulders and across her upper chest, with a pair of wide flat fabric bands hanging off it like towels draped over a horizontal rod, hanging straight down behind it, against her chest, and stretching distally in front of it, presumably continuing on to wrap around her flanks; a grey rope wrapping around her neck and criss-crossing in front of her clavicles, held in place by a copper piece where they cross, and connected to a sheet of fabric only a few inches wide; A flat strap or semi-torus similar to the first version described, but wider toward the back of her neck and narrower toward the front, holding a pair of large chunky rings which in turn hold an overlapping pair of grey fabric pieces My orc character Yihenaalbrin standing in a sort of wide-stance contrapposto pose against a white background, head-to-toe in frame, next to a black silhouette of a human woman in the same pose. Yihenaalbrin faces us and turns her head slightly up and to her left, with her arms at her sides but not touching her flank or hips, and the human silhouette comes up to her elbow/solar plexus. She has dark olive green skin and short dark brown hair, and a very wide, sturdy, bottom-heavy frame with a proportionally small head (but still larger than the human's). She wears an unusual outfit of partly-overlapping aprons and cloaks and straps, with one piece on the back of her forearms and across her upper back, another across her back and hips extending partly around the front to cover her breasts but leaving a gap, which widens as it descends, and an apron hanging below her navel down to her knees, with straps going around her waist.
September 19, 2025 at 7:09 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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A small oil-painted portrait of the proceratosaurid dinosaur Kileskus, peering in from left-of-frame and showing us its neck and head facing right. A bluish purple crest sits atop its midface, with vertical black and white marks rippling along its base, the snout has small, dark grey scales and a marigold stripe running from the base of the crest to the nostrils, with short black feathers forming a rounded trapezoid in front of the eyes, and marigold feathers covering the rest of the visible upper body. The yellow gets paler/duller in proximity to the eyes and the forehead behind the crest, and has black flecks along the back of the neck, and has a much more subtle pattern as it forms a beard along the lower jaw. The beard is smoothly included in a disk-edge that forms along the back of the head. The portrait is set against a grey background.
September 19, 2025 at 6:25 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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An oil painting on the top of a square box lid, depicting a pair of ospreys in a large nest, with a river and trees on the opposite shore in the background behind them. The sky is a cloudless gradient of soft dull blue to a slightly paler horizon, taking up the top half of the painting and slightly overlapped by the ospreys, and the river is a more vibrant turquoise color, running left-to-right but completely covered by the nest on the right half of the painting. The trees and foliage on the opposite shore are a dark olive with some subtle variation. Of the two ospreys, the foreground one stands facing us obliquely and tucks its head leftward to clean its right wing, and the osprey directly behind it is in-profile, facing right-of-frame with its head and chest peeking out from behind the foreground osprey's shoulder. An oil painting on the top of a square box lid, depicting the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. The sky takes up the top 2/5ths of the frame and is a rich medium blue with very few clouds except down near the pale horizon, and a tiny, partly crescent white dot in the upper right corner represents the moon. The distant horizon is composed of a pale bluish line of trees on the right and left, and a darker, nearer line of trees at the center of the horizon, with pine trees and palm trees. Between the horizon and our position are various overlapping stretches of dull yellow grass and mangrove-shrub-bearing waterways, some small dark stands of palm trees, and more vibrant, variable foliage on the nearest shore to us (about 30 feet away), across a bright blue stretch of water that we appear to be hovering a few meters above. There are a couple white egrets in the middle distance and on the near shore, an alligator poking its head above the water on the near right, and an ibis on the lower left, its hindquarters cropped by the bottom frame, with brown shoulders, a white neck, and a long, curved red beak facing away from us and to the right.
September 19, 2025 at 6:08 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
Quote with your blue art!
An acrylic painting of a beach, looking out to sea with the horizon slightly above the middle of the canvas, primarily in bright blues for the sky and sea and a medium-saturation sand color for the, well, sand, with an array of multiple Kutchicetus at various distances and positions within the scene. The Kutchicetus are long-bodied, short-legged, long-tailed, big-headed archaeocetes (the precursors to whales), nearly hairless in my reconstructions with primarily grey bodies and white or brown markings around their limbs, tails, and faces, with high-set eyes near the back of their narrow heads, wide cheeks and jaws coming to a sort of pear shape, and long, slender snouts. In the foreground one lounges with its back to us, its hindquarters out-of-frame, picking up its head to vocalize such that we see the top of its head rather than either profile of it. A digital render (in Blender) of an alien planet, cropped such that most of the apparent bottom-half of the circle is below the frame, with the terminating shadow sitting parallel to and just above this bottom edge. Since this depicts the planet as of its Northern Spring Solstice, the edge of this shadow cuts directly across the south pole, and we are viewing this planet's southern hemisphere. A large landmass covers the upper left (and then some) of the portion of the planet we're seeing, with a little bit of snow on the lower left, a narrow rift-ocean on the left, and dark blue, purple, and brighter magenta vegetation on the right-facing coasts. The planet depicted here is Ayrum, which I was commissioned to map out for a client. An acrylic painting of an underwater scene, with a dark blue background, a sandy foreground, and a teal gradient between these in the midground. A dark grey Clidastes (a Mosasaur) swims in from right-of-frame, its back half not in frame yet, carrying in its jaws the yellow-winged carcass of the Pterosaur Muzquizopteryx. One large fish (a Pachyrhizodus) and several smaller fish (Pepemkay) swim by a little distance away, their features muted and blurred by the water. The Cliadastes casts its shadow on sand near the bottom edge of the piece, and the Muzquizopteryx's right wing is draped over the mosasaur's neck.
September 15, 2025 at 2:06 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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An oil painting of the Aurognathid pterosaur Batrachognathus volans, on a panel of pale blue foamboard. Against a marigold-yellow abstraction painted behind it (which doesn't take up the whole panel), the Batrachognathus presents its fluffy chest as it raises its round, short-faced head toward the top left corner of the piece, and lowers its wings diagonally at its sides (which are cut off at the blurry edge of the marigold shape). The chest and underside of the jaw are covered with paler pycnofibers relative to those from the shoulders to the snout, but there is no clear delineation until the area around the mouth. Its richly colored, almost orange brown eye has a small horizontal pupil and dark grey eyelids, and about the same size as the eye is a patch of pale skin anterior to it that meets the darker lip tissue at the front of the mouth (the back of the mouth is fluffy). Aside from this patch of skin, the lips, eyelids, and membranes of the wings, this pterosaur is otherwise completely covered in fluffy, grey and white pycnofibers, even to the chin and the space between the nares at the tip of its snout. The same face as seen in the painting, but in pencil on dark paper instead, obliquely facing right-of-frame with an open mouth and viewed from eye-level rather than from above or below. With its mouth open, we can see a bunch of tiny, pointy teeth, uniformly pointing straight up or down relative to the jaws. Another difference is that the bare flesh on its face is uniformly dark-grey rather than the patch anterior to the eye being pale, and the pycnofibers are uniformly light grey.
September 11, 2025 at 8:25 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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A simple pen-ink sketch on white paper, depicting a pair of Suchomimus (a large Spinosaurid dinosaur) facing partly away from the viewer. One, closer to us, has its back completely to us but is raising its head skyward so we can see the back of its neck with blunt small spikes, the top of its head, and left side of its long narrow face pointing to the upper left corner. The individual scales aren't rendered, but I did do some like crosshatching to imply the rugose texture. The other individual, partly hidden by the closer one, has its left flank facing us and is turning its head sharply away, such that we only see its earhole and the very foreshortened tip of its snout, mostly blocked from view by the muscles at the back of the jaw. A simple pen-ink sketch on white paper, depicting a lone Sordes (a tiny, fluffy long-tailed Pterosaur) flat on its back with its wings spread out to either side and its legs and tail up in the air and its head held up to look that direction. We are looking at the Sordes from its right side and close to the ground, so we mostly just see the closer of the two lightly-filamented wings. The body overall is coarsely filamented (covered in hair-like Pycnofibers), including its head except for bare skin on its eyelids and back corner of the mouth, and black keratin at the very tip of the snout and chin, and there are also filaments on the up-raised tail giving it a striped pattern. Its eye has a thin horizontal pupil, its open mouth is filled with pointy teeth, and its wings and legs each have three free-bending digits and one digit supporting a leathery membrane, though the membrane on each leg is much smaller.
September 11, 2025 at 8:11 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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A lightly-done pencil sketch on tan paper, depicting a Bambiraptor (a small Maniraptoran dinosaur) taking up most of the page. Its head faces left-of-frame at an oblique angle, near the upper right corner, slightly parting its jaws to reveal an array of small needle teeth and turning its large, dark, birdlike eye toward us. Its snout is feathered nearly all the way to the tip, leaving the portion in front of its nares bare, it has a short beard of feathers extending down its jaw but leaving the chin and lower lip bare, and there's a raised rounded square of bare tissue at the back corner of its mouth and a pair of small crests poking out of the feathers in front of its eyes. The rest of its body is a faint silhouette, a vague torpedo shape pointing from the lower left corner to the upper right corner.
September 11, 2025 at 7:04 PM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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Six screenshots of a digital sculpture in SculptGL, arranged like a series of window panes, depicting my reconstructed bust of the early hominin Paranthropus boisei from several different angles. The hominin has a small braincase, a prominent browridge, large eyes, a flat, apelike nose, a forward-projecting mouth with thin lips slightly parted to reveal wide, flat teeth, and very prominent cheekbones framed by a thick pad of tissue which gives the front of the face (from the outer edges of the eyesockets to the corners of the mouth) a wide, flat shape. This reconstruction has mostly dark brown skin with paler, peachier patches around the mouth and at the distal edges of the cheek pads. This early piece loosely inspired my more recent digital sculpture of the OH 5 fossil (as seen in my latest video alongside 8 other reconstructions), especially in the pale skin by the mouth and the pad of tough tissue framing the face.
September 11, 2025 at 12:49 AM
onlyscarcelyscaly.bsky.social
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A digital painting all in shades of grey, depicting a large, oddly shaped therapod Deinocheirus backhanding a much smaller ornithopod Homalocephale off the ground, while another Homalocephe freezes and looks around frantically in the foreground. All these dinosaurs are set against a solid pale grey background, with only their shadows on the ground to suggest that there *is* ground. The Deinocheirus is tall and covered in fluffy short feathers, with large, 3 fingered hands, a dark grey torso with a humped back (such that it looks like a gumdrop on legs from this oblique angle) and a long camel-like neck with pale feathers along most of the back of it trailing toward the hump, dark feathers on the throat, and topped by a long, goose-like head with one tiny eye turned toward us. Its right arm (toward left-of-frame) is the one backhanding the Homalocephale, lifting it off the ground by the speed and force of that blow so that the little dinosaur's tail and back legs point skyward and the flat-topped head is a foot off the ground. Both of the Homalocephale are small and bipedal, with tiny arms, short-ish necks, birdlike legs, and long stiff tails, their bodies mostly scaled but with short bristly feathers on their hips, thighs, and the baseward half of the tail. They are mostly dark but with a paler blotch centered on their shoulders, like a little vest with no straight edges.
September 11, 2025 at 12:17 AM