I needed a crash course on ancient plants, but the SF Botanical Garden fortunately has an educational exhibit on that very subject. Ferns and conifers galore!

Question time! I'm planning to do another animatronic expedition on Wednesday, and one of the trickiest parts is correcting the feet. Are there any good one-stop guides to dinosaur foot drawing? How many toes, which have claws, etc?

I'll probably be heading back to the "Dinos Alive" exhibit in Oakland pretty soon, so I've been studying up on the featured animatronic dinosaurs (plus Dimetrodon). I want to have a good handle on their actual sizes and historical context.

It's been a few years, but I'll once again be doing a class for this year's online Wild Wonder nature journaling conference. Early bird pricing ends July 1!

Connect with nature, joy, art, and wonder, at the 8th annual Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference – live online Sept. 15-19, 2026. Video Passes are on sale now, and scholarships are available. Save $30 with Early Bird Pricing (ends July 1)! Learn more and sign up at wildwonder.org/26

I've been delving into paleontology stuff again (more on that in a bit) and I'm relating to @restingdinoface.bsky.social's aversion to lazy cliches about "dynasties" and "dominance" and "biological need to be the alpha" (ahem). It keeps making me think of issue 10 of the original "Swamp Thing"...

A bit of unused handout ephemera from this week's Cartoon Camp at @cartoonart.bsky.social : How to enjoy museums, according to me and Julie.

So anyways! I haven't done much on my Gundam site in 2026 so far, but I've been working on one weird side project: Translating excerpts from director Tomino's old Gundam novels so I can use them to trace the development of the Gundam world's back story... gundamunofficial.com/archive/gund...

Okay, one tiny comment to add in response to @bretdevereaux.bsky.social's Gundam thread. Some of the replies mention the idea that recent works like the "Gundam Hathaway" movies present the giant robots in a more realistic, mechanical way. That's true to some extent, but...

Nothing to add to this, I just enjoy it when people I follow in one context make a random foray into one of my other interest areas. Now tell us your favorite dinosaur!

Aw man. I'm going to take a moment for Anthony Head appreciation.

ALRIGHT EVERYONE HERE IS THE OFFICIAL SUFS GUIDE TO LEAVING PUBLIC COMMENTS ON THE OMB-2026-0034 PROPOSED RULE: www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-advocacy/the-sufs-guide-to-writing-public-comments (share with all your friends!)

Not going to go into detail because I don't want to spoil anything, but we caught the "Backrooms" movie on our local theater's discount nite, and I thought it was really worth seeing.

Big civic engagement day! I voted in our local primary elections, and watched a video webinar organized by @standupforscience.net about fighting back against the administration's full-scale attack on US scientific research.

I'm frantically cramming on the Chicago Manual of Style for an editing job, so no time to draw something new for National Dinosaur Day. Instead, here's a flashback to my 2019 visit to the magical @nhm.org in Los Angeles... (1/4)

Pondering my past experiences with life-size dinosaur models (animatronic and otherwise). Aside from Moab Giants, the best was probably Dino Safari in Vegas, which has now finally reopened in Boston! Note that it seems I'm always compelled to boop Kentrosaurus snoots.

Final painted versions of my sketches from the Dinos Alive exhibit in Oakland. They're displayed in roughly chronological order, so we get some Triassic rarities including my beloved Plateosaurus... (1/3)

I love me some animatronic dino exhibits, but indoor ones with low lighting and colored gels make it next to impossible to capture colors on site. So I end up with a lot of painting homework afterwards...

Gonna go experience being immersed in dinosaurs. Catch you later, crocodiles.

As much as I love the demonic creature from the alternate ending of "Watcher in the Woods," and the Moder from "The Ritual," the Rat-Bat-Spider from "Angry Red Planet" remains my undefeated favorite movie monster. What's yours?

...Well, now *that* was an alternate ending worth checking out.

"But this is what you wanted! This is what you wanted to see! This is what you wanted to know! ...Now you know."

Really busy couple of weeks so I don't have time to document this in detail, but I wanted to show you the cool rock I found while I waiting for the bus. I think it's probably chert!

The only scientifically accurate depiction of Helen of Troy is in Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History of the Universe." Everyone else is just a coward.

The best stock photo sources these days are very specific people who take photos of very specific things. This guy takes pictures of trains. All trains all the time. Only trains. Do I have to worry that one of these photos is AI? Nope. He would never disrespect a real train in that way.

Really busy this week, but hopefully I'll go see some animatronic dinosaurs next week. One of the pleasant surprises of the "Jurassic Quest" show I visited last year was that the dinos were pretty much scale-accurate, and I even did a rough comparison chart.

Cock-of-the-rock

Now, the complete travel journal for last week's LA trip! (I'm posting these as spreads rather than individual pages, because the multi-image format crops the images to heck and I'd have to write a ton of ALT text.) First: hotel arrival, delivery robots, and a visit to the old side of LACMA. (1/6)

I haven't scanned all the pages from this week's LA travel journal yet, but just as a teaser, here's a spread from Sunday's @bbdragula.bsky.social Titans show. Jay Kay, Jaharia, and Evah Destruction were all fantastic, but my heart will always belong to Abhora!

On the flight back from LA, an angry toddler in the row ahead of us spent much of the trip wailing "I don't want it!" Not clear what "it" was supposed to be, but you use the words you have, and that seems like a good general-purpose phrase for the times in which we live in.

I took my wife to see a really big fat sea lion for her birthday. Everyone loves Chonkers!

Once again looking over old drawing tips in preparation for making new ones. This was a satisfyingly nerdy digram! My sense is that most of the interesting perspective effects on human figures disappear at a range of 20-25 feet.

Color flatting is going pretty well. Should have some finished pages ready soon...

World's not actively blowing up today, so I'll risk a frivolous post. My wife and I have been delving into the Chinese TV series adaptation of "Three Body," which is currently on the free Tubi service. 30 episodes, so there's a lot more to go, but so far she's enjoying it!

Since I'm pondering another round of figure drawing tips, I'm looking through my old notes from the "Fantastic Figure Drawing" class I used to teach to see how I handled this a decade ago. Along the way, I unearthed this entertaining scale chart...

Tomino is in the news, so maybe check out my Patreon if you want to read hundreds (and eventually thousands, if we ever get there) of pages of his musings on war, with a lot of sex and a lot of violence thrown in for good measure.

My better half thinks I should keep going with the figure drawing tips. In that case, I'll need a fresh topic. Maybe "people sitting down"?

So yeah, it looks like I'm on the "AI Haters" blocklist! The description for the list says "Subscribes to anti-AI blocklists or otherwise seems poorly disposed for productive conversations." I don't do the former, so it must be the latter, which sounds pretty cool so I'll add that to my profile.

I don't think I'm a particularly regular poster, and I hardly ever say anything about AI, but apparently I managed to get myself blocked by a certain infamously thin-skinned member of the Bluesky development team. I finally feel like I'm one of the cool kids.

It took me a minute to remember where I knew the name "Noah Hawley" from, but this account of a weird weekend with Jeff Bezos might explain a bit about "Alien: Earth." How could xenomorphs ever hope to compete with billionaires in the monster category?

I spent Sunday afternoon out at Ocean Beach with some nature journaling buddies. Everybody loves mole crabs!

I also have a short thread on why some box crabs like to squirt, and why they're called "shame-faced crabs".

Planning out a fairytale-based demo for a storytelling/storyboarding workshop this afternoon, and I suddenly have questions about "Jack and the Beanstalk." Like, what's the deal with the magic bean vendor? Why didn't they use the beans themself? What did they do with the cow?

Publication seems a REALLY long way off, but do reach out if you'd like to schedule a book signing, talk, reading, podcast interview, exhibition, or any combination of the above to help get A New Unfeathered Bird off to a flying start next year. 'A celebration of all birds, across all time'.

I finally read @tetzoo.bsky.social 's "Dinopedia." The content is mostly an overview of dinosaur groups, but the book is a rare treasure trove of adorable Naish dino-illustrations. Here are some of my favorites... (1/3)

A really great book on dinosaur drawing! Get 'em while you can!

Somehow I found myself maintaining three differently sized notebooks at the same time. I have a sudden impulse to draw lots of dogs...

students practice pareidolia - what they came across and the cartoon character they made from it... Part of some discussions on how drawings come alive and how powerful our visual system is... (w/thanks to @joshneufeld.bsky.social for prompting this as an assignment)

I haven't added much to my Gundam website since the start of the year. But behind the scenes, I'm working on some "Char's Counterattack" production history stuff, and also wasting some time on a side project for which the margin of Bluesky text limits may be too narrow to contain an explanation...

A lighter subject, in reaction to an unrelated post: Our household has been doing some movie catchup. We just watched (among other things) "Gravity," "F1," "Weapons," "Maxxxine," and "Embodiment of Evil." If you have hot takes on any of those that you've been dying to share, I'm all ears!