While sitting in the waiting room of Ecole Québec Musique as my kids took their piano lessons, I was thumbing through some nature magazines when I came across a photo of a Chamois (a type of mountain goat). I wondered how some paleobiologist would reconstruct it millenia from now. Would (s)he give it leathery skin, like a reptile, or fur, or feathers and paint it blue and red with splashes of yellow?

I decided that I would like to try to transform this animal into something reptilian looking.

I was not terrible successful. I wasn’t anywhere close to creating something passable as a flight of fancy. Clearly I need a lot my practice with using GIMP.

Basically I ran into two problems. The first and major one was finding some sort of reptile skin pattern to use. I couldn’t find samples big enough and if I tried tiling the little ones I had, there was noticeable pattern repitition. The second problem was getting the texture to flow naturally over the skin, rather than looking like a flat surface applied on top of the image.

However, not all was lost, I did make this image I am rather fond of (and, yes, in my quest to make reptilian skin, I even tried using a brick pattern).

The original photo is here.