How NOT to draw a velociraptor versus how you should draw them. My dad could hardly believe they were the same species.
Anyway, This shows a traditional Jurassic Park "Raptor", with all the inaccuracies generally attributed to it, in comparison to the real thing. Lately I've been becoming a real stickler for inaccuracy, especially when concerning maniraptorans. In this drawing is not only the feathers, but the configuration of the feathers on the body, which so many people get wrong, along with the hands and several other aspects. So, there you have it. How velociraptor would have looked in real life, excluding crests, display wattles, and anything else it may have had, in comparison to how most people view the creature. I'm going to stick this drawing up on my locker door at school and hope it will change the way people view dinosaurs. Feel free to do the same, if you think it'll help.
And just as I was scanning this, I noticed that I forgot to put the greatly reduced first toe in both of these drawings.
`ChewedKandi has certainly gone out of her way to keep the vector community on the right path. Always making sure that her talents are infinitely scalable, Sharon has put her bezier curves to excellent use, and firmly anchored herself as an inspirational leader. We're absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for June 2013 to `ChewedKandi. Congratulations, Sharon! Read More
Sta.sh
Though I think you're overestimating our degree of certainty in some points.
First, the keratinous beak. There's no actual evidence that deinonychosaurs, or even the earliest avians, had it. As JohnFaa pointed out, the presence of feathers right to the tip of the snout in some species is actually evidence to the contrary. Even if there were no feathers on the snout, we have no idea whatsoever should the snout have been scaly, wrinkly or beak-like.
Second, the wings. We know Velociraptor probably had pennaceous wing feathers, like you have depicted. Their closest relatives had them, and the creature itself has preserved quill knobs. However, we have no knowledge of their size or if the animal had a full set of flight feathers like the smaller, gliding species or not. They might have been this large and been used as, say, balance devices when jumping on a prey animal, but they might also have been a lot smaller to enable efficient use of hand claws. Or something in between. We don't know.
By the way, why doesn't your Velociraptor have hind wings too? Microraptor, Anchiornis and other small deinonychosaurs preserved with feathers had four wings, so why no pennaceous feathers whatsoever on the legs?
Point number two. Notice I did not specify the specific lengths of the feathers on the arms. We have no idea how long they were, so I made them fairly long, but not as long as in modern birds.
Point number three. When I drew this, I had not heard the idea that larger deinonychosaurs may have had small remnants of hind wings. Rest assured that all my recent drawings have pennaceous feathers on their hind legs.
Thanks for the comment.
I don't recall myself stating that deinonychosaurs had beaks either, though if I did, I was wrong. They almost certainly didn't.
On hind wings, we don't really know if flightless deinonychosaurs had them. There is some evidence they might have been lost entirely in at least a few flightless taxa (Jinfengopteryx doesn't preserve them), but at this point you wouldn't be considered definitely wrong whether you add small hind wings or not.
I haven't read mr. Albertonykus mentioning beaks, but elsewhere I know Gregory Paul has reconstructed his deinonychosaurs with a remnant beak, but Jaime Headden (Qilong here in Deviantart) disagrees, here: [link]
Quote from him:
"There is quite literally no reason aside from speculation that even early birds like Archaeopteryx had beaks, and no reason to think, even if Paul’s “neoflightlessness” hypothesis is correct, to presume that larger-bodied, larger- and many-toothed theropod dinosaurs would have had them. "