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Elasmoray

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Despite her long neck, this gal is neither a Dinomammal nor a dino-anything-else; in fact, she is a manta-analogue relation of the Elasmomorph ([link]). Like her cousin, she could represent a potential future or an alternate past, but is probably the result of a panspermic seeding and recombinant gene-mixing project. Like many fictional marine creatures, this one also strikes me as cryptid-like…I could see a lone fishermen startled by this mysterious phantom drifting just below the surface and disappearing into the dark, never again to be seen by human eyes.

Not much to say about the concept behind this one, it was just an image that came to me when I was looking at the branched head of my dental floss holder juxtaposed with a little toy manta ray on my computer desk. I was struck by the idea of a ray body with a manta-like head at the end of a long neck. It took me a while to make the connection that the body design is essentially a seagoing Groveback! And as *DSil could tell you, it has canard wings. :lol:

I’m still struggling with watery effects in my backgrounds; they always end up looking like sky. : / I used another of my own beach trip photos and "tarted it up" in Photoshop, as some of my UK friends would say. I tried adding some extraneous detail to the creature’s ventral surface for the sake of visual interest, because let’s face it, the underside of a manta ray isn’t the most captivating thing in the world.

I’ve had a lot of ideas for marine and aquatic creatures lately, many of them with overlapping morphological similarities despite their lack of any relation to one another. I’ll have to see how many of them pan out. And oh, the name on this creature is terrible! I just wanted something parallel with "Elasmomorph" to close the association between the two. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
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sidetrack1's avatar
Some ppl draw strange creatures with tentacles but I think in some of yur pictures you've found a cool way of making a thing out of drawing creatures with fins! :)