Dimetrodon Head Study and Maquettes

While working on my efforts for a large scale dimetrodon drawing I decided to try working on toned paper for the first time. I'm doing a headshot and was surprised to see that the toned paper seems to eat up colored pencils pretty quick because of the paper tooth but it isn't leaving the particles all over the place that seems to happen when I work with illustration board. I usually have to brush every few minutes but at this juncture I haven't brushed a single time and have seen no ill effects! I also thought this would give me a chance to get the prismacolor bug out of my system because I was wanting to do the scene in graphite...What has happened unfortunately I have now planned on doing a super large version of a head shot of some sort of dinosaur...I say unfortunately because I know it is going to destroy a lot of pencils in the process...plus I'll be working on the graphite scene at the same time...but perhaps doing two really big projects at once will keep me motivated...





I made some maquettes and had some trial and error issues...I started with foil to just get the mass of the body. I was really concentrating on the pose...I used to have a couple of different monitors (a savannah monitor and an asian water monitor) and I remembered vividly different ways they would posture themselves depending on the situation...


Then I overlaid the foil with sculpey...Mistake number one...I should have started with wire in the foil and set the arm screws first. It didn't make that big of a difference because I knew the maquettes were rough...if I wanted to make a detailed model there would've been lots of cracks I would've had to dealt with. I then got toothpicks and cut them in a manner that would give a good sail...sails seemed to vary depending on which skeleton I looked at with regards to shape and how they laid.I was smart enough to pre-press holes for the toothpicks...an even better solution would've been to use wire attached to a wire frame...a couple of former students showed up and one of them had some leftover wire which she donated to me...Thanks J-PO!!!




I wasn't happy with how the back laid out because it seemed too straight at this point so with the second one I made a bit of correction and then went back and adjusted the arch on this one with some additional sculpey...the other problem I ran into...the fingers were fragile and while I could use foil to protect parts from over-baking eventually the items started cracking slightly...instead of doing all for legs at once and baking I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stand the item...so I did one leg then baked x's 4...