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Description
Everyone else was doing it, and it looked cool. So I did it. The note at the bottom suggested music as an influence, and I mean really ... as if I didn't gather enough stuff together. I tried to keep it back to everything that influenced me up until high school graduation, but there are a few things that leaked over.

Influences include art and writing.

From the Top:

* too many deviantART artists to start naming because you guys are so awesome and I learn so much from other people's art, Anime/Manga, the classic Star Wars trilogy (I actually owned the book pictured...can't seem to find it though), 80s/90s cartoons such as The Centurions and Tale Spin (and there's a little Dead-Eye Duck in there, who was voiced by Scott McNeil, which made me laugh because of course my favorite character would be voiced by Awesomeness Himself (show is Bucky O'Hare))

* the spectacular animation in PBS's 1992 special "The Dinosaurs," Joanne Bertin's Dragonlords (don't you see the Rathan? There would be no Zanzibar as we know him without the Dragonlords), Dinotopia's art and layouts, the ORIGINAL Land Before Time in all it's dark glory, Paul Bransom's 1912 illustrated edition of The Call of the Wild, Elfquest

* Todd Marshall, the airbrush paintings of Jim Burns, Jurassic Park, Beast Wars (dragon Megatron was an influence for my cyborg Silvia-Nerasa), Tolkien, Dinosaucers, Animorphs

* The Pirates of Dark Water, Titan A.E. (I love Stith and Niddler staring each other in the face), Frank Frazetta, The Wheel of Time (painting is Darrel Sweet's cover art for The Dragon Reborn), The Lion King (image is of Kopa, from those books that came out after the first movie...I thought Kopa was a terrific idea, and yes I totally blocked out Zazu with Andalites and a Hork-Bajir, what was I supposed to do? Cover more Frazetta? Or that lovely Stegosaurus that I mentally referenced so many times you would think I'd actually be able to draw like that by now?), and Cirque du Soleil, which is my primary influence for the colors and styles of my Saurians, particularly the dancer Sorono Gezsamdi.

I think that maybe I might have overdone it.

I still forgot stuff. Like Joseph Zucker's illustrations for Dragonworld [link] [link] which I sat down with one summer and copied from in black ink without tracing, to teach myself how to do textures in ink. I still refer back to what I did when I'm working in pen. It was actually done from two different works, one of which was Dragonworld (which I have yet to actually read), and the other of which was an old Lord of the Rings journal that has some really fantastic pencil work, which as also been a major influence.

I am a great fan of much of the fantasy art from the 70s and 80s, including that of Rankin and Bass, Boris Vallejo, and Peter Laird [link] , who draws in that same style that I know and love. The best thing about his blog is the nostaglic quality of even his current art, but especially of the art he did back in the 1980s. It takes me back to so much of the art I grew up with, my uncle being an artist himself. He worked in ink at the time, and his style was similar to Zucker's and Laird's, though still a thing all unto its own.

Since high school graduation, the influences have expanded to include many of the great artists and architects I studied in school, and a great many books on how to draw, as well as many of my professors and classmates, whose criticism still serves me well. You all rock. deviantART, among other things (such as The Wheel of Time), is also post-high school.

Original template [link] by

Description
Everyone else was doing it, and it looked cool. So I did it. The note at the bottom suggested music as an influence, and I mean really ... as if I didn't gather enough stuff together. I tried to keep it back to everything that influenced me up until high school graduation, but there are a few things that leaked over.

Influences include art and writing.

From the Top:

* too many deviantART artists to start naming because you guys are so awesome and I learn so much from other people's art, Anime/Manga, the classic Star Wars trilogy (I actually owned the book pictured...can't seem to find it though), 80s/90s cartoons such as The Centurions and Tale Spin (and there's a little Dead-Eye Duck in there, who was voiced by Scott McNeil, which made me laugh because of course my favorite character would be voiced by Awesomeness Himself (show is Bucky O'Hare))

* the spectacular animation in PBS's 1992 special "The Dinosaurs," Joanne Bertin's Dragonlords (don't you see the Rathan? There would be no Zanzibar as we know him without the Dragonlords), Dinotopia's art and layouts, the ORIGINAL Land Before Time in all it's dark glory, Paul Bransom's 1912 illustrated edition of The Call of the Wild, Elfquest

* Todd Marshall, the airbrush paintings of Jim Burns, Jurassic Park, Beast Wars (dragon Megatron was an influence for my cyborg Silvia-Nerasa), Tolkien, Dinosaucers, Animorphs

* The Pirates of Dark Water, Titan A.E. (I love Stith and Niddler staring each other in the face), Frank Frazetta, The Wheel of Time (painting is Darrel Sweet's cover art for The Dragon Reborn), The Lion King (image is of Kopa, from those books that came out after the first movie...I thought Kopa was a terrific idea, and yes I totally blocked out Zazu with Andalites and a Hork-Bajir, what was I supposed to do? Cover more Frazetta? Or that lovely Stegosaurus that I mentally referenced so many times you would think I'd actually be able to draw like that by now?), and Cirque du Soleil, which is my primary influence for the colors and styles of my Saurians, particularly the dancer Sorono Gezsamdi.

I think that maybe I might have overdone it.

I still forgot stuff. Like Joseph Zucker's illustrations for Dragonworld [link] [link] which I sat down with one summer and copied from in black ink without tracing, to teach myself how to do textures in ink. I still refer back to what I did when I'm working in pen. It was actually done from two different works, one of which was Dragonworld (which I have yet to actually read), and the other of which was an old Lord of the Rings journal that has some really fantastic pencil work, which as also been a major influence.

I am a great fan of much of the fantasy art from the 70s and 80s, including that of Rankin and Bass, Boris Vallejo, and Peter Laird [link] , who draws in that same style that I know and love. The best thing about his blog is the nostaglic quality of even his current art, but especially of the art he did back in the 1980s. It takes me back to so much of the art I grew up with, my uncle being an artist himself. He worked in ink at the time, and his style was similar to Zucker's and Laird's, though still a thing all unto its own.

Since high school graduation, the influences have expanded to include many of the great artists and architects I studied in school, and a great many books on how to draw, as well as many of my professors and classmates, whose criticism still serves me well. You all rock. deviantART, among other things (such as The Wheel of Time), is also post-high school.

Original template [link] by