It's based off Ginkgo apodes.

Thank you very much, Nova! That is really interesting about the Belgian dúccle chickens. Most of my "Microraptor not gliding" images are loosely based off fancy pigeons, specifically types like this [link] and [link] . I hadn't considered using chickens for reference though and now I'm looking up videos of them running! This is giving me some great ideas for new paleoart, hah.

In principle, I agree with you that Microraptor was very likely to have (at least) some amount of arboreal ability, for Naish's piece on claws and many other reasons. However, this certainly does not preclude its ability to glide off rocks! If I recall correctly (and bear with me, it was almost 5 years ago) it was actually Scott who encouraged me to draw it gliding from a rock rather than from a tree. Arboreal evidence aside, think of it from a sort of All Yesterdays perspective: sundry illustrations of Microraptor in trees, climbing trees, and gliding from trees have been done, but much fewer exist showing the animal gliding from higher ground to lower, which it certainly would have also been capable of doing!

I also am a very strong believer that the known gut contents of Microraptor absolutely do not indicate it was a solely arboreal predator. Remember, one of the greatest predators of birds is the common housecat! (And it is not usually killing them in trees.)

I can appreciate the sentiment about including an enantiornithine, but I must defend that choice as well: I strongly believe that Microraptor was likely an omnivore that employed a very wide variety of dietary supplement, and I thought it would be kind of boring to paint it chasing something that's already been published and illustrated. A second large feathered animal in the spotlight (especially so close to the viewer) would also have been really distracting: these illustrations are meant to be largely diagnostic, showing off the animal's anatomy and full body from a non-confusing perspective, and needs above all else to be understandable to Creationists. So a certain amount of simplicity is required. I can appreciate that you think it'd look better chasing nothing, and that is how I planned the composition originally. I included the wasp because I think it works better compositionally, and also because I enjoy educating people about a piece of the invertebrate Jehol fauna, which tends to enjoy much less of the illustrative spotlight than its feathered contemporaries.

It is too bad that it looks "stuck on". I struggled somewhat with getting the wasp to look naturally blended with the environment (trust me, it looked much worse earlier on) but I guess I didn't wholly succeed at that.

Lastly, the issue with the legwings: In the description for the piece, I link to the new research (yet unpublished) indicating that Microraptor may have held them differently in flight/glide, which is much more recent than that PBS special (incidentally I showed that to a few people not long ago and they were uncertain at how accurately the legwings were depicted). Every professional I've talked to about this specific issue have indicated that legwing position is not yet an open-and-shut case, so I thought it prudent to remain conservative in my depiction so as to avoid the likelihood of it being rendered inaccurate in the future. The position I drew the legwings at is intermediate between the positions of the two "camps" and would have been possible in a takeoff position if either "camp" ends up correct. Keep in mind that the animal is not yet in a full glide here, it is in a leap.