Sketchasaurs- Maiasaura

 

With Mother's day coming up this weekend, the species choice for this felt appropriate.

This is my first animated experiment with a new NPR rendering style I'm trying out. I've had a better feeling for a while about my sketches than my final renders (as most small artists do, I'm sure), and I was looking to emulate that here. I think I struck a nice stride here with a mixture of CGI's fidelity and traditional media's control and direction. This certainly isn't me giving up on color or more detailed pieces, but I really like how this turned out and think it would be fun to experiment more with this. Let me know what else you'd like to see done like this!

Anyways, Maiasaura is a deceptively important animal as far as our understanding of dinosaurs. They were known to be reptiles since the 1850's, but besides that, very little was known about their lifestyles until a slew of new discoveries and actual cooperation with biologists gave us more insight. One of the most spectacular came in 1978 when this then-unnamed hadrosaur was found in Montana not by itself, but in a massive nesting site with dozens of members of its herd. The 76-million-year-old colony was tightly packed like a seabird colony, and the nests showed signs of care with neatly-arranged eggs and decomposing plant matter laid on to provide incubating heat. This is what prompted the name, from the Greek words for "good mother" and "lizard" with a feminine suffix (-a instead of the typical masculine -us). Over 200 individuals have been found to date of varying ages, with some preserved well enough to show stomach contents, making this one of the most well-recorded prehistoric animals we have.

Rendered in Blender Eevee 4.1