Pern - Leg Arrangements

Some sketches showing different possible legs for Pern dragons. About 5 hours in Photoshop CS3.

The drawings/photos on the left are not mine.

I don't mean to say any of these are or aren't definitive forms of anatomy for Pern dragons. I'm just practicing and testing. My old Pern drawings don't really look like any of these (see the scraps, particularly the Green and Gold: [link]). There are lots of different ways that Pern dragons can be drawn that I have not included here, such as making them look thicker/more bovine or much more lizard-like, etc. This was meant to be a quick and dirty look at some possible leg arrangements.

Horse - The reference photo is a thoroughbred. Maybe I should have gone with a draft breed. Anyway, most Pern fans know of the dragons as being somewhat-to-very equine, so for the first sketch I just tried to apply that as literally as possible. The legs are a lot thicker than a horse's though...I can't suspend my disbelief enough to make a skinny-leg dragon with horse anatomy. Maybe later, in a more in-depth look.

Kangaroo - Pern dragons are described as moving on land with a rabbit-like or kangaroo-like hop, having wimpy front legs and powerful back legs. Thus, kangaroo dragon! I kind of like this one.

Colin Saxton - You're saying "who?" McCaffrey says this guy's one cover (for the UK ver of Dragonsinger) is closer to her vision of the dragons than any others.

Michael Whelan - Highly prolific US Pern cover artist. I would have loved to use his Ruth on All the Weyrs of Pern, but I can't see the front legs too well. His other Ruth cover (The White Dragon) is pretty ugly and different from AtWoP. I have to admit, I almost didn't pick up the Pern books when I was 12 or so because I hated the dragons on the cover so much (a similar story happened with me and the book "The Elvenbane"). The art is very good-- the dragons (especially on Dragonflight/etc) looked like "little old bald men" to me. They made me wince. But as his art is very influential to common drawings of Pern dragons, I include him here.

Steve Weston - Prolific UK Pern cover artist. I have never seen any of his covers before today, but he came up when I searched for polls of people's favorite Pern covers.

So what's next for these sketches? Well, this just shows the dragon standing on land, in its most awkward position. I would like to examine each set of anatomy more thoroughly (get some skeleton and muscle references!) and show them flying, etc. I can already tell the horse version would be a little ungainly in the air.

References: [link] / [link] / [link] / [link] / [link]