Here’s a first approach at the Kentrosaurus head. I’ll be trying to loosen myself up with some alternative sketches after this round, but always respecting the underlying skull. A made a 3D mesh around a skull geometry and thenbeefed it up with more volume akin to the varanus studies.  then I painted over it… following my take on the cheekless, beak-like mouth. The open mouth version comes as a complete surprise even to me, as its following the concrete volumes and rotation points given by the skeleton, then you swing it open and… nice. Half dragon, half bird.

Trying to get my hand de-rusted, playing with ideas of display behavior, gulping, tongue display (they must’ve had massive tongues) and dewlap-type displays. Don’t take anything serious yet, just getting over my inhibitions…

Old news, I know… but ’tis the time to think big thoughts of the coming year. Aside from my own ambitions this would be really cool. The above ‘Brontosaurus’ spread is from William Joyce, Pixar artist and author of Dinosaur Bob book series.

Oh, and should you think Pixar is the goal of every young creative, check out Austin Madison, an “aspiring paleontologist currently working as an animator at Pixar.” A guy’s gotta set his sights high, right?

How can science become something tangible? By approaching it as a game… watch the above video. Then read the paper and keep an eye on the Lottolab. Below Lotto’s Ted Talk…

The first step in an illustration contract is to define goals and expectations. This is the only way to keep your compass functioning during the many revisions and issues that arise along the way. Well, I don’t have a client on this one, and its still the most important step.

My goals are as follows:

• to apply concept art methods to paleoart, see how applicable they are
• to broadcast this methodology, particularly the variation and trashing phases, as I feel they may be a way to make the artist-scientist relationship a more productive two-way road
• to produce an illustration of high-resolution finish quality, worthy of sharing with the world as such, which primarily communicates a specific scientific hypothesis (Heinrich Mallison’s) embellished by my own visual plausibility experiments
• learn and have fun

So, right now I’m closing in on a Kentrosaurus as it is attacked by an Allosaur. As I’d like to get some behavior out there that everyone seems to be in agreeance on (yes, yes – enjoy my naivety) I imagine a Kentrosaurus rearing to pluck the ‘fruits’ from a bennettite. It notices danger and goes into an intimidation pose.

The last is the heart of the exercise and may be a sequence. Eventually I’d love to animate it. Kentrosaurus under attack. I want to introduce the Allosaurus but visually focus on Kentrosaurus’ defense. And I want the pose to read a basically reflexively determined behavior, spinning about its hip axis using its front legs with the goal of keeping Allosaur in – so to speak – the rear-view mirror.

I want to do a 3D skeletal reconstruction (which will take at least a week) and use the 3D volume as a perspective aid for my digital drawn illustration. Don’t expect a smooth ride, I’ll be working out a lot of new methods as I go along. Will share the process here.

Staging, depth, composition… the concept art up top is much more convincing than the final below. Just me?
Taken from the very informative making of article at fxGuide.

The Senckenberg museum in Frankfurt has a great wall of elephants about 40 meters long… I composited a bunch of photos into a flat view, detail below is that first skull on the far right (Deinotherium giganteum). Download the big original by clicking the first image.

The occasion? The artEvolved elephant gallery!

Fantastic post over at Myrmecos, my favorite ant blog. (Click the cow.)

.

Click on John Travoltage to check out my post on the animation renaissance going on in science outreach.

Took my varanus approach and did a speedpaint (app. 45 minutes) of a Plateosaurus skull (largely a tracing from a still from the Loewentor video) and subsequent paintover. Some of my thoughts while doodling:

• dorsal scutes; seems of later sauropods had large, triangular scutes down their spine, the prosauropods would likely have them too.
• lips; the ridge and pinhole artifices (man, my vocabulary is rock solid!) indicate soft tissue. I went for lizard-like lips here… no muscular attachments, no closing in cheeks. I suspect that they had very capable tongue musculature which wolfed in vegetation… not happy with my solution yet. In contrast, the Kentrosaurus will have no lips, and more of a lower chin shovel to keep the vegetation from spilling out
• throat tissues; I think there could well have been impressive display mechanisms about the throat, like Brian Engh‘s but differently shaped. Not inflatable either, but Anole-like or possibly diverted from the beefy tongue
• nostril; I’ll have to pursue the bulging chamber more. It hardly comes across in this sketch. There is an edged depression that looks like the monitor lizard’s, and I like the idea of a rigid, chamber there with the nostril opening itself more forward. No soft baloony stuff though. That seems suspiciously like a strangulation bag for a beast that would suck in a respectable volume of air every few minutes
• only alluding to skin structure and coloration. No real exploration here yet.

That’s it. Off to the races.

You say tomato, I say tomato – and yet we both sound completely different. Bones are bones, and yet everyone is convinced they go together in different ways, supported different tissues and were used in different ways. As an artist, it’s easy to find this frustrating. Can’t I just get the blueprints and get to work?! If Kentrosaurus looks as divergent as in the three images above, how can they claim to be scientific? I mean those are constructions by a gaming model, the Geological Museum in Warsaw and a mount in Tubingen. Err. gaming model, what’s that doing in there?

Well, the long spike is either presented as being over the shoulder or hip, and  it was the first case I found of a literal compromise; smack dab in the middle. While that’s one way of dealing with the controversy I’m going to follow a different path – I’m going to reconstruct Kentrosaurus, making all these controversial decisions myself. Fortunately, I’ll be accompanied on my journey by an authority on the subject, Heinrich Mallison.

The goal is nothing less than impressive still imagery that communicates defensive behavior posited in Heinrich’s paper.

So, where where the spikes? What posture is plausible? How can I pose this guy to communicate behavior? How do i find time to actually get the work done? All this and more hopefully before the end of the month, possibly a bit beyond.

The Archeopteryx in Berlin is a beautiful object – aesthetically and scientifically. They have it in a darkened alcove lit from alternating positions so that you can see how much the light influences what you are able to see. I tried to mimic the effect here, though I’ve sped it up quite a bit… suspecting the internet crowds won’t be patient enough to stick around waiting for the lights to change.

edit: forgot to mention how cool it would be to have a UV light station

It’s wrong, but its still cool. The Plateosaurus skeletal mount in Stuttgart. Here’s a stabilized walk about the hip.

Click on the composite screen grab to go over to my review at AWN.

When I’m at a museum standing in front of an articulated skeleton, I can’t help imagine the advantages that interactive illustrations will bring to transferring understanding of creatures such as this Plateosaurus from the Loewentor museum in Stuttgart. I imagine rotating a specimen not just vertically, but horizontally. Playing with its jaw, pulling on its snout with inverse kinetic chains running realtime down its neck and scrubbing about the phylogenetic timeline.

There will be some disadvantages too, of course – and standing in front of real stone will always be irreplaceable. To do it even a tad bit of justice with my amateur video shoot, I’ve stabilized the footage in post.

So… in order to get up to speed for the true task of the month, it’s obvious that I’ll have to get my drawing hand into shape, shaking off that crust of rust and start thinking about reconstructing Kentrosaurus.
As a primer, I’ve grabbed two images of Varanus indicus, one skull and one living beast – drawing them to fit one over the other in order to get a feel for at least one analogous soft-tissue reconstruction. I was inspired to do this after noticing how much this guy’s nostrils bulged out. Unfortunately, I’m only working from googled images here… no opportunity to poke and prod and such.

Notice the position of the nostril’s opening compared to the skull opening, and how much the soft-tissue cavity arches over the nasal depression on the skull. Function? Might be to lessen warmth & water loss, I have no idea. (Please pipe in if you have ideas, and feel free to correct terminology – I’m new to this!) Other interesting features are the bone over the eye and how small the eye is in comparison to the skull opening, and the volume of soft tissue about the neck. No surprise with all the musculature, trachea and esophagus.

Coming soon…
I go raving mad and rant about what I consider implausible fleshiness by established artists as capable as Louis Rey, then try my own hand at those big nostril-ed beasts called sauropods, possibly getting expert feedback rants in return. One can only hope!

I suspect that my now turning towards something as aggressively organic and analog as tattooing is in some way, a rebellion against the cold, souless techno-hypnotic mind freeze of the computer game. I’ve paid my dues playing with computers and you know what? I’d much rather interact with a flesh and blood creature with a soul. Something that talks to me and twitches when I poke it. Something that bleeds. And when I look deeply into a living organism, I see a miracle so complex and miraculous, it makes the greatest super computer look like a pair of rusty pliers. So there….

Joe, you rock. Read the rest here.