Overview

Flying animals, both past and present, can make wonderful sources of creature design inspiration for games, film, and television. Many of the classic creature concepts in fantasy and science fiction genres include physically implausible configurations that can undermine the believability and impact of the creature design. Using real animals as a guide can help solve some of the challenges of designing flying creatures.Flying Monsters: Illustrating Winged Vertebrates, thoroughly traverses the history of flying creatures, analyzing and explaining the mechanics behind flight for both large and small. The abilities of all flyers give us a window onto other fantastic types of creatures we could invent and get off the ground. With this gorgeously illustrated book, full of content on biomechanics, artists in the concept art field will be well educated to create their most captivating, creative and authentically believable flying beings.

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9781624650765

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Terryl Whitlatch was born in Oakland, California, and started drawing at less than three years of age. Blessed with a mother who was, and still is, a talented artist-illustrator, and a father who taught biology, her fascination with animals started early. Countless weekends were spent visiting zoos, aquariums, and museums, and her father was constantly bringing home mounted skeletons, creatures preserved in jars, and living animals as well - chicken hatchlings, bullfrogs, iguanas, and insects. Horses were always a part of her life, and her passion, as her grandfather had a horse ranch, and paid for years of riding lessons. Most of Terryl's formal education was in the sciences, rather than art--Vertebrate Zoology to be specific, but after studying illustration at the California College of Arts and the Academy of Art University, Terryl began a career that has spanned over 30 years. She has worked with many major studios and effects houses as a highly sought after creature and concept designer. Clients include Industrial Light and Magic, Lucasfilm Ltd., Pixar, Walt Disney Feature Animation, PDI, Entertainment Arts, LucasArts, Chronicle Books, and various zoos and natural history museums. Terryl acted as principal creature designer for Star Wars -- the Phantom Menace. She designed most of the alien characters and creatures, from concept to fully realized anatomies and stylizations. Some of the significant characters include Jar-Jar Binx, Sebulba, the pod racers, the undersea monsters of Naboo, and the Naboo Swamp creatures. She also worked closely with George Lucas in the redesign of such pre-existing characters as Jabba the Hutt and the dewbacks. For Disney Feature Animation's Brother Bear, she designed bear, moose, and other animal characters, from highly realistic anatomical studies to fully branded characters. Feature films to which she has contributed concept work include John Carter of Mars, DragonHeart, Men in Black, Jumani, and Pixar's Brave. She also is the creator and illustrator of five books: The Wildlife of Star Wars: A Field Guide, The Katurran Odyssey, Animals Real and Imagined, Science of Creature Design, and Principles of Creature Design. She has also contributed illustrations to Lucasfilm's The Jedi Path, and Book of Sith. Terryl is currently working on new industry and intellectual properties, that involve both real animal and imaginary creature designs simultaneously, and recently completed work on a project with Disney Imagineering. She continues to actively design for the Star Wars Franchise and many other projects. She is also a lecturer in Animal Anatomy and Creature design, and is an Instructor for Schoolism.com. Her passion is her love of animal life, in particular horses, and the portrayal of all species, as best she can, in her art. Dr. Michael Habib, Assistant Professor, Integrative Anatomical Sciences at University of Southern California; Research Associate, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Carnegie Museum of Natural History is a biomechanist and a paleontologist exploring the relationships between animal structure and motion. His work combines comparative anatomy with concepts from modern engineering. In addition to traditional publications in professional journals, his work on pterosaur launch was featured as one of the top 100 science discoveries of 2009 by Discover Magazine. Dr. Habib has authored numerous scientific papers, appeared in a diverse array of television specials, and written for The Conversation UK, Scientific American, and Universe Today.

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