Wildlife & Railway Art - Frédérique Lucas

I’ve been so busy with the illustrations.. I all but forgot to keep you guys updated on them! Six new cetaceans have joined the ranks of the MARS (Marine Animal Response Society) commission: five bulb-headed friends and one beauty ;) Although, they’re all beautiful if you ask me.

Most species will be by represented by a single image, but a few have separate illustrations for males and females, when the sexes differ significantly from each other. The northern bottlenose whales here are the first example of such a species. Today it’ll be the turn of another beaked whale pair, and a third illustration featuring another species.

To stay with the Lagenorhynchus genus after the White-beaked dolphin, up next is this beauty: the Atlantic white-sided dolphin. Combining sleek grey with ochre and brilliant black and white, these dolphins have some of the most splendid and beautiful markings of all cetaceans.

It's amazing how old records can prove very useful to this day: of particular help for this painting are highly detailed photographs taken of a handsome male who stranded here in the Netherlands... more than 30 years ago! In 1985 a large male came ashore and was documented in stunning detail. Full body side views like the ones taken then are invaluable when making illustrations like this.

Here’s three little dolphin friends I painted today for my updated gallery menu buttons over on Deviantart! The last menu buttons I made were from like... six years ago??? Not too bad, but the new ones are decidedly more aesthetically pleasing. Also, any excuse to paint some of my fave dolphins is one I’ll take. I got a bit lazy with the white-side though - you may recognise it as a repaint of the white-side on my Delphinidae poster that’s in the works. What can I say, I just really like the looks of that one.

I spent the last three days paintings birds (which I unfortunately can’t show you yet) and though the duskies and layard are actually on the menu these days, tonight this beautiful lady was calling me. 

She’s part of a poster that’s in the works featuring all 39 (oceanic) dolphin species. Which I think is pretty cool because a) it’s going to show only females, instead of the usual male domination, b) shows animals of average and plausible sizes instead of The Biggest That Ever Was and c) DOLPHINS. Still gotta find or plan in the time to regularly work on this again, because I would love to see it finished in the near future!

Pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens)

A scientific illustration done just for fun; these days it’s rare. I definitely need to do more of them! But a while back I at least found an excuse to finally paint one of my favourite cetaceans... the Pacific white-sided dolphin. They're also known simply as 'Lag', in reference to their scientific name, even though they share their genus with five other species.

Pacific white-sided dolphins reside in the cool waters of the northern (you guessed it) Pacific Ocean. In the south Pacific lives a very similar looking dolphin, the Dusky dolphin (L. obscurus), which these guys diverged from some 2 million years ago. Pacific white-sides are exceedingly pretty cetaceans with complex markings in shades of grey, black and white. Although highly distinctive, there is a lot of variation in markings between populations and individuals, sometimes subtle, sometimes very obvious. Perhaps best known in US waters is an anomalous colouration pattern known as 'Brownell's dolphin', so named because naturalists first believed it to be a new species.