There’s a whole lot of gnarly branches in the elephant family tree, and I thought I’d go looking through there to see if I could find elements of elephant that I could incorporate into the Grootslang without having to beat the viewer over the head with “hey, it’s an elephant!”-ness.
At a glance, Deinotherium pretty much screams “elephant-snake,” with its downward-curving tusks and thick trunk (assuming that restorations were at all accurate), and I’ll probably do something along those lines. Makes one wonder if some leftover early elephants were the cause of the myth; Deinotherium fossils have been found in Kenya.
This is good, but what (if anything) can we do about the snakey bits? Aside from a less-versatile jaw and (gasp!) even having legs at one point, primitive snakes were much like the snakes we know today, at least according to some research I did during downtime.
Maybe the vestigial limbs will make some sort of appearance down the road, but for now, I’m a little more interested in the head:
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I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about elephants and snakes and not enough about making sure that there was an appreciable difference between the Grootslang v3 and Deinotherium, so I ended up kicking out a few additional sketches to play with the idea a bit more.
Making the tusks thinner (and more like a snake’s fangs) and changing their position some helped a bit, I think. To be honest, if anything, I’m liking my previous Grootslang more than what I’ve got currently; I’ll have to see about combining the two.
