(click for larger view)
As of late (and that being the summer on to most of this year) I've viewed the IF topics and done thumbnails but never really got around to the finals. I should have the process for this posted shortly (and it now is). The entire piece was done in Prismacolor...I learned my lesson with watercolors on illustration board...too heavy and you get peeling illos if you aren't careful, so I just bit the bullet and ran with it...
First step was doing some sketches on the back of envelopes, napkins, bulletins...whatever was around trying to work out general design issues of angles and such...then I went to locate some skulls of the dinosaur I was wanting to use...Once I located the appropriate critter I did a sketch of the skull and started fleshing out and working on the composition...my first thought was to have two dinos fighting but I thought that if I did a slightly battle scarred dino (the white eye is meant to be blind and there is some tearing around it)facing off against a turtle defending his turf I might be able to have at least a touch of sarcasm...
After getting the basics lined out I started doing the detail work of the dinosaur. I had to do multiple drawings to get the pose correct. I then transferred the finished drawing onto illustration board. This was detailed in an earlier post and kept me from having to redraw the same elements over and over or overworking the image on the illustration board.
My first big traditional media dino was my Yuck! pic. I left off the background intentionally on that pic as I wanted to have a clean focus on the dinos. My next traditional media pic was Blue T-rex...at first I was going to leave the background blank but decided I needed to get back in the swing of working on the composition as a whole. So I used watercolors to fill in large areas...of course I forgot to leave it flat and weighted as it dried so I got a nicely curled illustration board that is now seperating (my framer loves having to fix my errors). During the summer Steve of Flying turtle fame posted an item about drawing outdoors and I knew it would be a good idea at that point to do some studies to use one day...well this was the time to work on my most ambitious full scene...I knew there was going to be water involved (and had messed with distortion some on the earlier Gravity post) and had already purposed to use nothing but Prismacolor. I drew all the other items using light blue (see the Thin Blue Line post for the coloring process). I finally did some study of reflections and started throwing in items to help lead the viewer through...included is a rather obvious turtle and perhaps less obvious lizard in the foreground. The hardest part was reminding myself not to get wild with heavy burnishing on the trees so that the tooth of the illustration board would show through...and not overworking the items as they headed to the back in dealing with a bit of atmospheric perspective.
