Turkeyvulture - Tumblr Posts

I can't sleep😵 I drew some turkey vultures (top row) and a harpy/siren (bottom row) today (still a work in progress). Think I'm getting on the right track of where I want to take my harpy/siren design, sort of a very speculative-evolution/cryptid/animal misidentification way, but keeping some mythological/fantasy aspects to it. There's two morphs of the harpy; one mainland based, the harpy, and one marine/island based, the siren. Still working on details and origin story for them. Due to a catastrophe, the harpy, relative of turkey vultures with a pair of inflatable chest sacks and a beautiful call, was forced to inhabit a chain of fey-touched, small islands. The lack of predators and abundance of easy pickings in form of island creatures and miles of shoreline to comb for washed up creatures, made the harpy grow in size, and ferocity. When island resources declined, and competition rose, the harpy sought after food at sea, where the only abundant creature were weary sailors. The fey-touched islands' arcane radiation made the now ferocious and once again desperate harpy, rapidly evolve to take advantage of this resource. And so they developed behaviours, enhanced by their features, to charm and lull sailors into shipwrecking or to ket them close enough to slash and tear at their throats. #harpy #siren #mythology #greekmythology #specevo #fantasy #fantasyart #creaturedesign #fantasyzoology #worldbuilding #turkeyvulture #vulture #fantasyevolution #evolution #cryptozoology #art #sketch #sketchbook (at Stall Myra)

Behold! The revised design of the modern harpy! Revised my design from yesterday and realised that the previous post featured the "classic" harpy, the harpy that inhabited the archipelago and lived like a pretty normal vulture. This version is the man-eating, "temptress" of the sea, and the scurvy arial thief, stealer of feasts of the mainland. This is the modern harpy. You can see that the classic harpy's display features have changed slightly to look like a female humanoid, like its beak flaps have turned more vibrant in colour (not illustrated) and luscious, resembling lips, and its inflatable chest wattles have grown proportionally bigger, and gained more detail as to mimic breasts. #harpy #creaturedesign #art #fantasy #speculativeevolution #specevo #fantasyart #greekmythology #dnd #bird #vulture #turkeyvulture #animaldesign #monster #conceptart #sketchbook #artistoninstagram #artistofinstagram #evolution #worldbuilding #siren

July 12, 2017 - Glendale Avenue, St. Catharines: Riding around in this muggy mess. What first caught my peripheral vision as a murder of crows turned out to be something altogether more interesting. Webfacts: Terms for quantities of Turkey Vultures: In flight: A "kettle" of Turkey Vultures (apparently due to resembling rising bubbles in a pot of water) (if they say so, I guess). Resting (ex: in trees): A "committee". At a meal: A "wake". So here we have a fine committee of Turkey Vultures holding council on the roof of a church... Try and avoid reading too much into that.... Great birds!