Gaping Maws

Artists are always looking for great reference material to help them visualize the mental images one's imagination conceives for an illustration. For many of them, you can simply find willing (or reluctant) victims, dress them up, set up your lighting, and snap away with your camera. But there are some pictures that require a unique perspective and/or unnatural posing, such as flying faeries. After some googling, I discovered a blog where someone had posted supposedly sane teenagers in France, of all places, who free fall from considerable heights on to the concrete. And of course, someone records their flight.....well, fall is a more appropriate word, with a camera. Thankfully, this blogger stopped short of displaying the final splat, and the images happened to be perfect for what I needed for the faeries. Further searching produced a site of a person who liked to photograph pretty women under water. Even better. Now, say you need help illustrating two dragon's battling in mid-air. Photos of two dueling eagles helped me visualize the placement of the wings and such, but what about the fire-breathing mouths. Well, looky what I found: Gaping Maws! Yes siree, this has just about every animal possible with their mouths gaping wide. And it's even been recently updated. I'm sure I will find something here to my liking. I thought I would share this find with all of you. Enjoy. I know I will.