Oviraptor process

I really enjoy seeing the process people go through in creating a work. Not only is it great to see the transitions and helping spring me to new ideas and methods, but it also gives insight into how a person's mind works...and if yours works like mine let me be the first to apologize to you...


This is one of the sock puppets that were whipped up pretty quickly at the start of the school year in prepping for a project. (Hopefully as time progresses then they will all make another appearance in a more refined mode.)



Each sock puppet took about 5 minutes to quickly render. Upon completion of about 10 of these I got the hankering to do a micron drawing. And I thought the cassowary would be a great animal to render.


So I grabbed a reference picture and whipped up a cassowary...once I did the line work I remembered that someone asked me to do a pointillism piece so I started playing around with the shading using dots...then my mind said, "Hey, why not add watercolor to this." Then my mind said, "Hey, why not do a big dinosaur pic using pointillism with that fairly decent sized piece of illustration board." So knowing one of my online cohorts (the ever lovely Jane D'oh) was having a birthday coming up I thought 'perfect' timing and excuse...


I went online and found a skull pic...careful to avoid other people's renderings. I think one reason I like to draw dinosaurs is because you can do this! And because (as far as we know) there aren't any running around it allows you to put your own twist on a skeleton while fleshing it out. This was the exact skull I used for prepping the drawing.


Next I did a quick drawing of the skull in pencil and then fleshed out the rest of the face. I then went in and reinforced lines to get the primary contours I wanted to keep.



I then lightly redrew with more detail the oviraptor. I again started by redrawing the skull then fleshing it out. Remembering advice from James Gurney (check his blog out if you want to see a scientifically minded artist...link is on my barratuna site). Finally I started adding the points. One thing I had to be careful about was making sure I was paying attention to what the form of the creature was. I worked in 20 minute to 1 hour blocks adding in points. I would then break for an hour or so and then come back and do more.

The bottom pic has the levels adjusted in photoshop so the pencil lines are more easily visible to the viewer.


I continued to work on the item until complete. The image consists of exactly One million four-hundred thousand and three dots...or I could just be making that up. After completing the image I was hesitant about adding color to the illustration board. Having had some nightmares with water color on illustration board (and liking the stark contrast of just the b/w) I ran some prints on heavy paper.


I painted 10 prints by hand trying different color variations. Most people like the green variations.


But there is just something different about the blue one that I find interesting. I had planned on doing a red and yellow version and doing a Warhol effect but after weeks of dealing with this and the artistic attention span I decided to move on to the next project...

COMING SOON...the MOLEMAN...and by soon I mean anywhere from the next week to month...