Another quarter, another Prehistoric Times dinosaur drawing... I won't go into my purposes, suffice it to say I'm unpaid to do these drawings but I love dinosaur artwork so to do it and be printed in a magazine is compensation enough. My last completed work can be seen here:
This quarter, Pre-Times was looking for Struthiomimus artwork (if unfamiliar, see here). This is an athletic, ostrich-like dinosaur with many graceful curved lines: the S-neck, a stiff, balancing tail, strong running legs, arms curved back against its body like proto-wings to minimize wind resistance whilst running... So I wanted to try to stay away from my standard style of very detailed work to focus on those strong lines within a simple, iconic setting.
To that end, I was reminded of the ancient Chinese tapestries that featured birds in very Zen settings, mountain ranges and feats of nature that dwarfed human beings (who are usually sketched tiny, with just a few brush strokes, toiling away in an insignificant corner of the composition), the muted desaturated color palette, the long (instead of wide) composition, and especially the occasionally-thick ink lines. You can Google this type of artwork and you'll see what I mean.
Line work was done with an Ink brush in Corel Painter using an Intuos2 Wacom tablet, coloring was a mixture of Corel Painter's Colored Pencils, Crayons, and some custom Photoshop brushes. And some real watercolors were scanned in and applied for backdrops and textures, which would have been impossible in Painter because I'm too much of a n00b. Each piece was created individually; they were combined in Photoshop with final adjustments and aging and a very small, tiled canvas texture layered on top to tie them all together and give it all the old-school personality I love so much. Final Photoshop file weighed in at 1.7 GB and was 24 x 36 inches at 300 pixels per inch. Thanks for looking, and I heart comments!
Radek
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