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Description
As my second After Man redesigns for #spectember I chose the Vortex, which was maybe my least favorite creature as a child, because I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to eat. The art in the book makes it look like the mouth is fused shut and water goes in and out through these weird slits in the beak. Now that I've seen the initial pitch documents with Dixon's original sketches it makes a lot more sense, but I still decided to go with baleen-like keratin structures evolved from the palatal papillae of modern penguins. The neo-vortex is also an underwater flier with a pliosaur-like body, not an inexplicable whale-mimic like the book illustration depicts it.

In September 2020 I decided to start a new monthly drawing challenge and launched #Spectember, a free-for-all month of speculative evolution creations. Each wednesday was reserved for remakes of taxa from Dougal Dixon's spec evo classic After Man.

Description
As my second After Man redesigns for #spectember I chose the Vortex, which was maybe my least favorite creature as a child, because I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to eat. The art in the book makes it look like the mouth is fused shut and water goes in and out through these weird slits in the beak. Now that I've seen the initial pitch documents with Dixon's original sketches it makes a lot more sense, but I still decided to go with baleen-like keratin structures evolved from the palatal papillae of modern penguins. The neo-vortex is also an underwater flier with a pliosaur-like body, not an inexplicable whale-mimic like the book illustration depicts it.

In September 2020 I decided to start a new monthly drawing challenge and launched #Spectember, a free-for-all month of speculative evolution creations. Each wednesday was reserved for remakes of taxa from Dougal Dixon's spec evo classic After Man.