Picasso looks very happy to see you, and he wonders very much if you like his red crest. He’s very proud of it, you see, and he’s been strutting around the field like a very large rooster. Continue reading
Ajax is big, heavy, and always hungry. He’s got a knack for sniffing out treats and getting into places he shouldn’t. He really didn’t think things through when he squeezed into the shed that one time… Continue reading
Looks like Alfred has found something to chase. No worries though, that butterfly has nothing to fear, and he’ll give up soon enough. Allosaurus (ah-low-saw-rus) wasn’t very fast, but he can’t help it- if it runs off, he’s got to chase it! After a quick sprint, Alfred loves to settle under the shade of a tree and take a nice nap.
What’s that you say? He’s a fearsome predator? Well yes, yes he is. Take a quick look at lions, and tigers, and bears (oh my!), and most of the time you’ll actually catch them napping. Crocodiles and eagles, Alfred’s closest living relatives, also do a lot of nothing. Once you have a full belly, why not enjoy a siesta in the sun? 🙂
You can find out more about Alfred at his critter page.
Fun Fact: This guy is the first critter that I kinda found my style. All the ones I drew before him were very inconsistent, but this one had the sketchiness and detailed painterly mixture I was looking for. All other critters after him I’ve been refining my technique and getting better.
Now I have to practice on my people!
Making progress…
I had a big surprise planned. The goal was to have Pete’s Postcards from the Shop all set up by my birthday (that’s today. I just set it as a convenient goal date. 🙂 )
The Critter Cards were done, I got the PDF file sorted out, Mailchimp all set up and ready to go…I run through the motions to test it out for myself and…
Nothing.
I wasn’t really surprised, since I can’t really use my personal email account to send you emails from the Paleo Petshop. But it was worth a try. I’m trying to spend as little money as possible until I start earning a little. This can turn into a really expensive hobby really fast if I’m not careful.
Not exactly what I’m going for. 🙂
So now I’m figuring out the best place to purchase a domain name, so that PaleoPetshop.wordpress.com can turn into PaleoPetshop.com. Only problem is that so many places offer so many different packages with bells and whistles I’m not ready for just yet. Like webhosting.
All I need is an official domain name, and the email address I can use with Mailchimp.
Wish me luck! I’ve got a couple of options I’m looking at, but it’s just a matter of figuring out which one’s a better fit. 🙂
In the meantime, here’s the Critter Card chart with all dinosaurs colored in. 😀
Coming Next Week…
A giant with a heart of gold, life is never boring when this big guy is around. Nothing is out of reach! He’ll stick his nose into everything until every mystery is solved.
Share your guess in the comments! He’ll be one of the critters over on the critter page. 🙂
If I have a clear image of what I’m headed for, then it may be easier to keep heading that direction. 🙂
I would like it very much indeedy if I could have a bit of feedback. Doesn’t have to be much, just enough to help me steer in the right direction. 🙂
First though, a quick (and brief!) rundown of what’s needed in a picture book cover.
There’s more to designing a book cover, but those are the basics. So I have a couple of questions for you…
With those questions in mind then, here is the sketch.
And here is the colored version as I have it now. It’s only colored as much as necessary to get an idea of style and general look. It doesn’t have fine details yet.
Thank you for swinging by my little corner of the internet, and thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. 🙂 I think it’s pretty awesome that indie publishing is an option, and that you can be a part of this.
Here are those questions again, and it would be most helpful if you could answer the questions for each image above. Whichever ones work best for each picture. 🙂
Thank you again for taking the time to help me give you something better. 🙂 I love to read your answers in the comments! 😀
Ajax is big, heavy, and always hungry. He’s got a knack for sniffing out treats and getting into places he shouldn’t. He really didn’t think things through when he squeezed into the shed that one time…
I thought it’d be fun to take another look at the older version of this big guy. I’m not entirely happy with how the light turned out on this one, but what changes I’ve made to it over the past 20 minutes haven’t changed much, so now I know I’m just procrastinating. 😛 Best try again some other time, after I get fresh eyes on the subject. 🙂
It sure is different than the original though. I think I’ve figured out the style for these guys, and now I just need to practice plants and backgrounds more. 😀
Making progress…
Things are coming along quite nicely, now that I think about it…
That’s a longer list than I thought it would be when I started writing it, now that’s awesome. 😀
Hooray for progress! Isn’t it great when you take the tiny baby steps, trudge along for a while, then realize how far you’ve come when you take a look back? It may not be much, but it’s a lot more than nothing, which is what I started with. And that’s good enough. 🙂
As my special treat for you, here’s a sneak peak at my “super secret project” 😉 Spoiler alert, if you can interpret my scribbles. 🙂
Coming Next Week…
The oft-proclaimed smallest dinosaur in the world is!…not as small as you might think. 🙂
Share your guess in the comments! He’s one of the critters over on the critter page. 🙂
So what’s science and what’s art? To keep this post short, I’ll cover three main points (there are always more, but we can save those for later). All drawings in these posts are quick doodles to illustrate a point, with not as much reference as I usually use, so there are plenty of inaccuracies for you to point out for me. But I do have this great toy model replica to look at when I’m clueless as to how something looks at certain angles. 😉
1. Toothy grin, or soft smile?
For starters, let’s talk about Ajax’s smile in the picture above. There’s a lot of discussion on dinosaur lips- did they have a toothy grin like crocs, or closed lizard-type lips?
On one hand there’s the study by Ashley Morhardt (unfortunately I can’t find it, so I’m relying on 3rd party sources). She compared the skulls of prehistoric and modern animals, and looked at the clues left behind by beaks, lips, etc…and her study suggests that sauropods like Ajax had a face more like a crocodile’s than the fleshy lips of mammals.
But…
This article by Duane Nash on the giant canine teeth of saber-tooth tigers (smilodon & relatives) gives some food for thought. The blog post has all sorts of cool info of what makes a tusk vs. a tooth. 🙂
Ajax’s teeth, like most dinosaur teeth, have a pretty healthy coating of enamel, the same stuff that coats our teeth and makes them hard. Enamel does best when it’s bathed in saliva 24/7, which is why mostly all animals that have enamel-rich teeth have mouths sealed shut by lips of some sort.
Anyway, Ajax eats whatever he can get a hold of. He does replace his teeth every once and a while (unlike our permanent set of adult teeth), but still, it takes a while to get a replacement tooth, so he needs to use each set for as long as he can.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to reconstruct Ajax and the other sauropods with closed, lizard-like lips.
It’s one of those things that we can’t know for sure, because even a mummy can’t give you a perfect picture, anymore than a raisin can tell you what a grape looks like.
2. How far can he stretch?
Oh boy, paleontologists have gone back and forth on this one for over a century. First thin, graceful necks like swans, then BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs comes out and shows the fruit of research claiming that Ajax & Dippy held their necks out like suspension bridges. They held their heads and tails in almost a straight line, and were unable to lift their heads higher than their shoulders.
More recent work has pointed out that if you add space for cartilage between the bones, then the necks of many sauropods had the flexibility to loop in a complete circle. The brilliant minds behind the SV-POW! team over at svpow.com (always enjoyable to read, but definitely more on the technical side) helped rekindle my love for the long-necked giants by holding their heads high again, and regain neck flexibility by taking soft tissues into account.
In short, we don’t really know. But Ajax would probably have a great deal more flexibility than Walking With Dinosaurs would have you believe. The bendiest part would be the middle of Ajax’s neck, with the ends less flexible.
I always think that animals are more capable than we usually think, so one of Ajax’s buddies has reached back to scratch at an itch on his leg. 🙂
Oh, and those two in the back with the puffy necks…that’s entirely speculative. Something weird was going on with Ajax’s neck though, that’s for sure. 😉
3. I think we need some bigger horseshoes…
Feet, especially the front feet, are usually drawn very, very wrong when it comes Ajax and his relatives. Many artists will slap elephant feet on them and call it a day. But take a look at one of Ajax’s tracks…
Ajax’s legs are like solid pillers, and all the finger bones are wrapped together to form a fleshy, padded, hoof-like structure. Only the “thumb” has a claw, which has some limited mobility depending on the species. Ajax can move his thumb claw up and down a little bit. 🙂
Scientists disagree on how much Ajax could move his wrist. So how far he has his front foot bent at the wrist is a bit speculative.
I’ve done a terrible thing and made his wrist flexible based on an elephant’s range of movement. 😛
Quick Question: Is there anything in the popular media you can think of about Ajax and other sauropods? What common misconceptions do movies like Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time give about Ajax and his cousins? 🙂 I’d love to hear your answer in the comments!
P.S.- You can always hop over the the A&S page to pick out who you want to see next! 🙂
OR
I can save you the big snore (because the technical stuff is tough to read, and I like this sort of thing!) and have an excuse to draw yet more cute critters, while sneaking in a few quick fossil facts in a bite-size post or convenient picture. 🙂
Why am I doing this?
The truth is that I got a little frustrated. All the dinosaur books for kids fall into one of two categories-
Super cute story and dinosaurs, but no science. For example, “Pteradactyls” lumped in with the dinosaurs, and dinos stuck with the appearance of rubber toys from the 80s.
OR
“Educational”, but tough to read. Because after reading a list of names like Tyrannosaurus rex, Euplocephalosaurus, and Parasaurolophus 20 nights in a row, I know that book is going to put aside for “some other time”. Plus the computer graphics always look a bit unpleasant to me.
Pete’s Paleo Petshop is the best of both worlds. A cute story with illustrations based on the latest scientific research I can find. But I also want to make clear what part of the illustration is something we actually know as fact, or really just an educated guess. Speculation. A hypothesis. 🙂
So this is the start of a new series called The Art & Science of Pete’s Paleo Petshop. That’s super long though, so I’ll have to shorten it somehow. 🙂
For your convenience, I’ll keep a list of all posts in the series here on this page, and I’ll update the list with links as we go along. I’ll begin with the main cast, and we’ll see where we go from there. 🙂
Main Cast:
Bonus Question: Any special requests? I’ll be going over these critters in no particular order, so if there’s one you really want to see first, let me know. First one to answer in the comments gets first pick! 🙂
I really love my country, and everything the founding fathers worked so hard to cultivate in the early years. So here we have some American dinosaurs to help us celebrate.
From left to right…
That’s all for now! Thank you for dropping by, and I hope your day is fun and safe. 🙂
Now here we have a few thumbnails. Thumbnails are small, quick sketches that are used to give the artist an idea for the composition of an image. In this case, thumbnails are useful for getting an idea for the layout of the illustrations. Which characters to use, where words might go, how the picture will help the words tell the story…it all starts gelling together in the thumbnail. Keeping thumbnails small helps force you to leave out detail, which helps to focus on the basic shapes.
Once I figured out which thumbnail I liked best I made it larger and cleaned it up a little. These drawings are mostly to figure out exactly what I need to find references for.
For example. I looked at a couple of pictures of flying birds to help me with Tango and his buddy on the left here (learn more about him here). It’s not known if these dinosaurs could actually fly or just glide, so this is speculation on my part. Short, broad wings are great for maneuvering thick forest, and you don’t need a lot of muscle for short bursts of flight. 🙂
In this case, I needed pictures to get ideas for poses! And for Terry and her friends on the right…well I needed a few reference pictures to have a clue what I was drawing. These critters are tough if you don’t draw the classic “silhouette from above/below” pose. 😛
Which makes a great example of what happens in the sketch stage.
In the thumbnail, I had one pterosaur (teh-roh-saw-r) flying past the corner of the page. An overhead flying view is so overdone I decided to have them perch on the branch instead. I also changed the species to pterodactylus (teh-roh-dak-tih-lus) since they worked out better for what I needed. Bonus that these guys are the poster children of the pterosaur group. 🙂
Here we have three famous giants of the Jurassic.
I’ve been doing lots of research on the necks for these guys, so that awesome snakey neck is not random. And yes, it is an awesome python neck (though this is about the limit of its bendiness.)
Also, can I just say how awesome it is to use a toy as a reference? Yes, you heard me. I went out and got a few toys (as accurate as possible) and I’m using those for pose reference. I don’t have the dippy, but for that one I got pictures of the toy online. 😛
Here we have Steggy the Stegosaurus (steg-oh-saw-rus). Original name, I know 😛
I used a toy I have for reference here too, but this one isn’t the best model, so I’ll be doing research to make sure I correct those inaccuracies.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this sneak preview! I’m starting to get an idea of what things will actually look like, and that’s pretty exciting after it’s been stuck in my head for so long! The words need a lot of work (they kinda suck at the moment), but the gist of the story is there.
I’ll never be fooled into thinking a picture book is easy again! 😀
Now my question for you is…Do you have any questions? Anything you want to know about what happens behind the scenes? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you! 🙂
Pete's Paleo Petshop 