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My new Mesonychoteuthis illustrations
- Thread starter Sordes
- Start date
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- Tags
- colossal mesonychoteuthis
I think one of the reasons why the eyes appear comparably small is because we´re used to see depictions of Mesonychoteuthis with totally exaggerated eyes. Those of the life-sized model which was made years ago for footage in a pool were for example way too large. That´s why I tried to use not any models or existing drawings (except for anatomical detail drawings of the arms for the sucker and hook arrangement) as references but focused soley on photos of real specimens, especially the fresh ones. If you look at them (like the big one caught by a Russian trawler, the 495 kg specimen and the one which was hooked and videotaped on a hoki line in 2015) you can see that the eyes are by far not as protruding and bulging as depicted on many illustrations. The same applies to Architeuthis as well btw.
I have also often the same problem with references when I make illustrations of animals from which we have only few photos of living and undamaged specimens. It can be sometimes an extremely difficult thing to find good fresh specimens for references, especially of deep sea animals (I have a big project of a fascinating deep sea anglerfish which did cost me countless hours of research for tracking down every single available photo in the internet for anatomical references which could be useful).
Some time ago I made also a depiction of the weird anti-predator behavior of pygmy and dwarf sperm whales in which they release a cloud of ink-like substance from their anus (it seems this is the very frist published illustration of thsi behavior). Finding good references for things like the body shape were also extremely time-consuming, because there are suprisingly few good photos of this animals available. I made also another (still unpublished) version of this btw, which features also a rarely illustrated cephalopod. The weird little whales that hide within a cloud of their gut fluid | Bestiarium
