Terra Ultima | Raoul Deleo

A wonderfully whimsical fantasy art project, Terra Ultima is a collection of natural world mashups by Raoul. There's a book and a Tumblr for more, but I wanted to save a handful of the more inventive creatures. Most are evolutionarily ridiculous chimaeras of real animals, but some (such as the sabertoothed toucan below) are just inventive reimaginings. Both camps are beautifully illustrated!

An eerily cute blue dragonfly crossed with an emerald green rabbit, with elegant transparent wings for ears, perched on a reed stem.
Those ears are just remarkable, but so is the fine fur work on the limbs.
A fluffy red panda like animal with six limbs and a short tail climving a log; its back is coloured to resemble the marking on a ladybird beetle, red with black dots.
The cleverly named "lady bear" is an adorable mashup.
A black and white watercolour painting of a toucan, except the bill is chunkier than normal and has two protruding "fangs" that cut up and around the outside.
Whilst most of the creatures of this world are mashups, I found this take on a sabertooth toucan (even with sabres that point upwards, which are normally referred to as tusks) was just a really cool design. Totally impractical, but a neat idea nonetheless.

Explore Other Notes

⬅ Newer

Space Jam

Max has done a performance analysis of the new Space Jam website versus the old, classic variation, with a damning …

Older ➡

A compound grid

I love Andy's new design over on Stuff & Nonsense. A large part of that are the cleverly diverse page layouts. Turns out, underneath that perceived diversity is a consistent grid, made …

  • <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> <p>A wonderfully whimsical fantasy art project,&nbsp;<em>Terra Ultima&nbsp;</em>is a collection of natural world mashups by Raoul. There's a book and a Tumblr for more, but I wanted to save a handful of the …</p> </body> </html>
  • Murray Adcock.
Journal permalink