Sunday, March 1, 2009

Member Bio: Ville Sinkkonen

I was kindly enough invited to participate into this blog so here I am wring my Bio post.

Hey, I'm Ville Sinkkonen, the wanderer of arctic tundra of Finland slayer of polar bears et cetera et cetera.
In normal life I'm undergrad student working my way trough achieving Bachelor of sciences, after of which I can finally specialise into Paleontology.
Getting into vertebrate paleontology in a country where we have only scraps of vertebrate fossil does not seem all that intelligent career choice, but honestly I can't imagine myself doing anything else.

I, like probably everyone here, started doodling dinosaurs in kindergarden but it wasn't really until I reached tender age of 15 till I started seriously practising drawing and boy did I draw! My old notebooks are all full of sketches of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.
Early on I was heavily influenced by the work of Gregory S. Paul. and that shows quite clearly on my earlier works like this Torvosaurus here.





When I grew older other influences creeped in like Todd Marshall, Mauricio Anton and more recently Michael Skrepnick.

I used to have pretty narrow focus when it came to prehistoric creatures (That focus being ofcourse the dinosaurs) but my years in university have thought me larger appreciation for ancient life and reading blogs like Darren Naish's Tetrapodzoology opened my even wider.

I tend to use all kinds of tools of trade, but I think I use ink and pencils most of the time followed by photoshop.

Recently I had the privilege to illustrate several ancient critters to Finnish museum of Natural History, and although that took lot's of time from my studies I can't deny the fact that it was a blast.

I don't think I have anything else to add so I'll end it here. I leave you with some samples of my paleoart. I hope you enjoy them!




You can see more of my artwork in my DeviantArt gallery here.


Cheers!!