Centaur Livestock Sketches (Patreon)

Development sketches. I ended up with two designs I'd like to start working more with, the big quadrupedal lads and the smaller bipedal guys.

The bipeds (duck goats?) are an ostrich sized animal that have short raptor-like forearms and a pair of highly modified rear limbs, which form a pouch for immature young in females and function like shark claspers in males. When their young get too big to be joeys but aren't weaned yet, they can often be seen following mom around on a string of nutritional silk. The silk is used as a diary-like foodstuff by centaurs, often being braided and smoked/dried for storage,  wound up in big wheels to be pressed like a cheese, or ground up, boiled, and filtered to separate the fat (butter?) and carbohydrates from the structural fiber.

The big guys I'm not quite sure what I'm gonna do with yet. They are from a different clade of 'mammals' that unlike the marsupial-esque centaurs and duck goats, carry young to full term internally (like humans/placental mammals). I was considering giving their clade a lot of hymenopteran eusocial tendencies with very physically different workers, queens and drones, but I also want them to be able to keep up with nomads on their yearly trek around the globe (so no hive building). I might end up stealing a lot of concepts from army ants. The queens I'd like to be elephant sized, though. Also, they have very immobile foretorsos/heads with forelimbs that have been modified into essentially being a mouthpart, used to deliver food to the mouth like the claws of a crab.

There were drawn with Birmingham pen company's Compost ink, a semi-waterproof black. I'm amazed how little it bleeds through on thin copy paper like this sketchbook is made out of.