I spent this weekend finalizing the armature for my piece. I'm about to start putting clay on it but I thought it would be good to take a picture of it right now with no clay on it. Recently I had been spending a lot of time working on my bronze hippopotamus but now I can concentrate on my creatures for this project.

I've made a lot of progress with my thinking about how the creature's skeleton will be. After using the motion studies to decide what I want the creature to do I could start thinking about how to do that. The sketch on the bottom was an attempt to draw the creature but since I want the creature to move so well I switched my process to drawing the skeleton first. The middle drawing is my first attempt at a skeleton that can do what I want it to do. Upon looking at it for awhile I noticed that a lot of the joints, specifically the ones at the top of the legs, just would not work in a convincing way. To fix this I decided to do the back and front legs to be very much like that of a big cat with the exception of the "knees" pointed inward on the bottom of the creatures legs to allow it to spread its points of connact with ground when it is using 8 legs to move. Another major improvement is that the middle arms are not attached to the spine which allows them to be used while the creature is running on its four legs. The inspiration for the wishbone setup of the arms comes for the noble chicken whose shoulder bones are setup in much the same way. Now I need to start thinking about the creature's muscles.