This has been a long-term project of mine for the past couple of years, which I’ve worked on on/off.

I really do hope to finish it one day soon, if I could ever get it started that is. My biggest problem is getting myself organized, and finding the motivation to work on it. I want to maintain some uniformity with regard to the drawing style, and the media used. Leonardo di vinci’s anatomical drawings were my biggest inspiration for these and I wanted them to have that kind of aged look about them. As time goes by though, my style changes.

For a while I was calling this project the Cyclopedia Anatomica Mythica (CAM), rather than “Bestiary”, because traditional medieval Bestiaries were less about being informative and more about being didactic. Their purpose was to use animals (and minerals) in nature to tell moral stories. On the other hand, calling it “Cyclopedia” makes it sound too much like the book that I use to reference musculature and the like. But since most people these days would call a big book of mythical animals a bestiary, I just decided to stick with it.

And it’s not going to be purely an anatomical book, since certain designs will get repetitive, but it will also talk about the biology/life histories of the species, in such a way that it explains whatever powers or interactions they have with humans naturalistically, such as the Chimera’s fire-breathing. They’ll also be arranged into family groups. For example, all the Unicorn-like animals will belong to the same family (Monoceras).

I haven’t made a list yet, there will be around 50 species of mythological animals in it, though that’s probably a gross understatement and it will include some of the more familiar creatures like Griffins and Unicorns, but also lesser-known creatures from other cultures, such as the Karkadan [link] Piasa [link] and Ahuizotl [link]).

Sorry guys, no dragons. I have my own theories on dragons, and they are just so ubiquitous, that I really don’t see the point.

For obvious reasons, I won't upload every image I'll be using in it, but I upload one here and there to give a sneak peak, or if I find one particularly interesting.