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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

A Big Dinosaur Event At Marvel Comics

For those of you, like me, who think that there needs to be more superheroes fighting with or against Dinosaurs, get to your local comic book store today and pick up a copy of Marvel's Avengers: The Initiative: Reptil #1.

This single issue story focuses on all things Marvel and Dinosaurian in nature.

Not that the art, by Steve Uy, within is promising to be particularly scientifically accurate. Or for that matter of an "intelligent" nature, but man it is shaping up to be both pretty and fun! Especially if you're into Dinosaur related property destruction and mayhem like myself!

The story in short form is the US government has taken something out of Marvel Comic's prehistoric lost world, the Savage Land, something so valuable its inhabitants are launching a full on attack against the modern world with an army of Dinosaurs!
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Now I could go on about prehistoric comic lore, but that would be defeating the purpose of this blog. So I'll end here by simply alerting you to this current Palaeo-Art event. Though I may do another post reviewing the art, once I get my hands on a copy (which could take a while here in New Zealand).
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However for those of you more interested in the story details or background of Marvel's prehistoric themed character please check out these summaries by my good friend, and Marvel employee Mike Hoskin who has been nice enough to do a whole week's load of Prehistoric Comic posts in celebration of this comic's release.

By Craig

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Palaeo Art Roundup #1

Welcome to the first ever ART Evolved Palaeo Art Roundup!

In these roundups we aim to highlight and gather as many of the various Palaeo-Art related posts and stories that pop up on the web as we can find! We'll be bringing you this feature every couple of weeks, and would love your suggestions for future editions.

If you see something cool and related to Palaeo Art be sure to fire it our way! Please include the web address at minimum, but if you want to write the caption or include a sample piece of art it'd make our lives easier ;p The email address is of course artevolved@gmail.com

So for this first week here are:

Brian over at Laelaps covers the tale of the sail backed Synapids (the theme for the next Time Capsule Art Gallery!) including the story of Charles Knight's first incorrect restoration of one.


Dr. Naish of the legendary Tetrapod Zoology examines in fine detail the Palaeo-Art proposed idea of trunked Saurpods, and pictures such as this one created by John Sibbick. Definately worth a read before drawing a long necked Dinosaur!

Glendon the Flying Trilobite, in this week's edition of his usual Artwork Mondays feature, takes us through his creating a new exciting Trilobite and Crinoid inspired banner for his blog.

This week saw the announcement of the earth shaking Tianyulong confuciusi, an ornithischian with feather like structures! You can catch the news of this here and there. A taken forgranted feature of this story is the amazing artwork of Li-Da Xing, which has accompanied nearly everyone's posts about it. The picture is great at bringing this animal spectacularly to life in the mind's eye. Ville of Dots In Deep Time has done a great skeletal reconstruction of this Dinosaur that is most definately worth checking out!

ETrilobite in this week's installement of Walcott's Quarry has a rather humourous encounter between Walcott and Gould the Wiwaxia.

Zach of When Pigs Fly Returns brings us an exciting and interesting illustration project surrounding possible speculative evolution of Dicynodonts.

Dr. Ryan of the infamous Palaeoblog highlights an old DC comic and the Dinosaurs and Prehistoric critters who menaced its heroes. This picture was penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Mike Esposito. Speaking of comics watch ART Evolved for a preview of Marvel Comic's upcoming Dinosaur themed special!

Also on Palaeoblog is the featured comic strip Liberty Meadow, by the awesome Dinosaur drawing comic book artist Frank Cho.

Scott over at the Coherent Lighthouse takes us through his artisitic process on his Pachyrhinosaur.

Gombessa Girl while checking out one of her favourite artists found some rather cute Mosasaur inspired sculptures.

We also recently saw the announcment of a new super powerful biting Pliosaur called "Predator X" (for now). Some great 3D art by Atlantis Productions have been accompanying the news posts.
Finally, Craig the Weapon of Mass Imagination has recently been retooling some of his 3D Dinosaurs for use in Traumador the Tyrannosaur's adventures.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Thoughts on Palaeoart II

By Peter

(This post is really a continuation of this post on my blog.)

What does correct palaeoart look like? Is it Sir Charles Knight's pencils or Luis V. Rey's colourful paint? How can you capture what an animal nobody has ever seen before looks like?

This is the basic problem that artists face when reconstructing extinct animals and plants. Interpreting skeletal material, skin impressions, and footprints, they try to create life! This is not an easy job. Mistakes are made, evidence is reinterpreted, ideas and theories change. As ideas change, so must palaeoart.

In a previous post on Bond's Blog, I took the example of Minmi paravertebra and discovered a huge range of reconstructions of this small dinosaur (even with over 95% of the skeleton found!) I would understand such variation in reconstruction for creatures such as Deinocheirus, where we have only found its arms. But for a well known extinct animal, why is there such variation in our reconstructions of it?

For example, I have searched the net for photos of another well known dinosaur: Edmontosaurus regalis.


























Skull length, neck length, arm length and positioning, muscle thickness and placement, feet and hand differences, even body pose... This variety in anatomy mixed with the subjective colour and texture amounts to a series of pictures that look like different animals.

Is one reconstruction better than others? What does "better" mean? If we equate "better" with "more accurate," then yes, some are more accurate than others. Accuracy comes with time, new discoveries and new ideas. Is the goal of a palaeoartist to be as accurate as possible?

What are the goals of a palaeoartist? Leave your comments below!

Artist Credits:
1. Charles R. Knight (at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History)
2. Karen Carr (2008 Dinosaur Society Hadrosaur)
3. Charles R. Knight (1897 Hadrosaurus from Century Magazine)
4. Joseph Smit (1905 Hadrosaurus from Nebula to Man)
5. Rudolph Zallinger (from the Age of Reptiles at Peabody Museum)
6. Dorling Kindersley (with DK images)
7. Unknown artist (from In Hand Museum.com)
8. Neil Riehle (2000 Edmontosaurus)
9. Unknown artist (Edmontosaurus from KidsFront)
10. Unknown artist (for the National Geographic Society)
11. Unknown artist (from the Jurassic Park Institute)
12. Unknown artist (Edmontosaurus from Urwelt Museum Neiderhell in Germany)
13. Joe Tucciarone
14. Todd Marshal (Edmontosaurus annectens)
15. Mineo Shiraishi
16. Micheal Berglund (for Bob Bakker and the Huston Museum of Natural Science)

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Making a Prehistoric Flood


By Craig



So the first thing I do when sitting down to do a composition is think to myself what is the story I want to tell today.
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When I approached my first piece for the Ceratopsian Gallery, I had the idea of showing the moment that one of the great Ceratopsian fossils sites was created. The particular site I had in mind was in northern Alberta at a place called Pipestone Creek, where a massive bonebed containing the remains of hundreds of Pachyrhinosaurs were discovered in 1972 (and worked until quite recently). These animals had all clearly been killed by a flood, and as it was pretty much just them in the bonebed they probably were all alive together before being killed (aka a herd).

So the story I wanted to show was one of the herd encountering this natural obstacle. Though it would claim the lives of some who tried to cross it, others would make it across successfully.

Here is the final picture for reference.

The only way I could pull off recreating a flood in the timeframe I had at the time (having to set up ART Evolved along side making this piece) was to create it via a photo composite.*
For those of you who have never heard the term composite before, this means taking a photograph and adding and/or subtracting things from it. In this case I was going to not only being adding Dinosaurs, but also a flooding river.

Looking through my many lovely pictures of the New Zealand landscape (it is such a great place to sub in for a Mesozoic era Earth) I discovered this perfect riverbank.

There was only one problem. There was no river, that alone one in flood!

However in my photo arsenal I DID have pictures of the local aqua duct flooding from 07.
It was not ideal at all though. The scale was wrong, it was too close up a shot. Not to mention the angle was all wrong.*
Still beggars can't be choosers so...


After some realigning in Paint Shop (my cheap Corel knockoff of Photoshop) I was able to get the flood facing roughly the right direction. Then some creative cutting and pasting supplemented by cropping of the water in a separate layer from the riverbank I had a rough flooding river.

Now sadly I didn't save this initial phase (I wasn't thinking about making a "Making of" post at the time) so you'll have to take my word on what it looked like. The problem it suffered from (more so than this finished one) was that the river unrealistically covered up the trees at the bottom of the hill.

So I went in and cut and paste several of these (but not all) back on top (in the photoshop layer sense) of the water. It was still missing something. So I went and grabbed some random tree tops and added them out further into the water to add some small growth submerged. That looked better, but one thing was missing. So some cut and pasted random splashes from the flood photo were added as water spray along the leading plants.

Though not perfect, this flood wasn't too bad considering the elements I had to work with.

Next it was time to add the Dinosaurs.

Recently I went through a huge Centrosaurid construction binge on Carrara, my 3D program, in anticipation of a big event I'm doing over on The Tyrannosaur Chronicles (check for it in about 2-3 weeks). So I had several short frilled Ceratopsians to choose from, including the two best known from mass bonebeds related to floods. Centrosaurus proper and Pachyrhinosaurus. I choose Pachyrhinosaurus as it is among my top favourite dinos and there have already been tons of pictures of Centrosaurus in floods.

Admittedly I am not totally pleased with the baseline colouring I gave this Pachyrhino, but I did figure that out till I was headlong into putting the model into my flood!


So having a 3D Dinosaur model is only a part of the battle. Next came the long process of duplicating multiple animals from the original, tweaking and individualizing them, posing them, and finally repositioning these in relation to the picture.

This was a whole day endeavour. Some of my effort is obvious, and is easily seen. Such as my remodeling a young "monoclonius" version of a Pachyrhino (which looked like identical to other juvenile Centrosaurids when their young).

Some of my tweaks were not so clear. For example if you pay close attention to each animal they're all slightly different lengths and sizes, and their horns are differently sized and arranged. I think this isn't obvious as every animal is identical in colouring, as I didn't have time to make new shaders for each animal. I think if I had made slight changes to each of their colouration these horn and size differences would have been emphasised rather than hidden.

Regardless, here was the poses and positions I ended up with. However without more work the picture was far from realistic looking so far. Dinosaurs that were underwater were still completely visible. None of them were casting any shadows either, which is a key element for compositing to look real!

So next I constructed a "shadow catcher" set for the photo. A shadow catcher is pretty much what it's name implies, it is an object in my 3D program that "catches" the calculated shadows of objects I'm rendering as per the lighting settings in the scene. At the same time they don't block or cover up the background, merely project a shadow onto it. You can see my shadowcatcher objects in the 3D window screen shot I included before, they are the grey rectangles the Pachyrhinos are standing on or swimming through.

Though this may sound and look easy, but it was actually quite time consuming. You aren't building the set from scratch. Rather you're having to recreate and mimic the angles and placement of preset positions determined by the background photo, or as they call it in the biz the "plate".

With my shadowcatchers in place I was nearly there. However the Dinosaurs were lacking excitement and interaction with the water, and the herd up on top of the hill was floating above trees that were clearly supposed to be in front of them. (Shadowcatchers are insanely time consuming to build for trees and other none straight objects).

So I went in and photoshopped the forest back in front of the waiting Pachyrhinos, and added splashes around the swimming ones.

Giving me this as my end product.

It's not perfect, but it could have been a lot worse too.

My main regret is the lack of animals. I'd have like 3-5 times as many. Maybe when I have more time (yeah right! there's a dream commodity) I'll retry.

So the new story is the back or front end of the herd arrives at the river where the banks are too steep to descend safely, minus one gentle slope. The majority of the animals take this single safe path to the water. However on the sides we see inexperienced youngsters risking the steep hills with varying degrees of success.

I hope this "making of" has been useful to you.

Monday, March 2, 2009

A Long Overdue Blog

Welcome one and all, to the brand new headquarters of Palaeo-Art on the internet!

This is a truly exciting moment. The accumulation of 4 months preparation and work!

What started off as an idea for a new internet carnival, quickly grew in scope and vision into something truly exciting and unique... The first ever blog dedicated solely to the art of recreating the prehistoric past.

Right from the get go it become obvious that to do such a blog correctly it was going to need multiple points of view. Who better to get outlooks on the subject of Palaeo-Art than Palaeo-Artists themselves. In addition to recruiting "the usual suspects" from the palaeo-blogging sphere, we also searched out and tracked down several previously "unknown" artists. Resulting in ART Evolved having a diverse team of incredibly talented individuals behind it.

Had it not been for the enthusiasm and gusto of this large group of virtual Palaeo-Artists, this site would not exist. I take a moment here to thank each and everyone of them for their participation!

Be sure to check out our member roster of bios. Also be prepared for their upcoming thoughts, insights, and methods on on and about the creation of palaeontologically themed art, that will soon be the meat of this site.

Our regular content will vary from tutorials helping you make own art, to reviews of existing art and artists, and/or scientific articles meant to help your prehistoric recreations be more realistic!
Then to every 2 months we will feature a new "Time-capsule" Gallery featuring the artworks of not just the ART Evolved crew, but of anyone and everyone who wishes to submit it!

So if you like to make art or are interested in Palaeontology please create an entry for these galleries. There is no limit to how many submissions you make, and there are no judgements or criteria on what will be posted.

As I leave you to now explore the site, please bear with us, as some parts of this site are not yet up or operational. Rome was of course not built in a day, and neither it would seem a multi member blog! If you notice anything we should fix please email us at artevolved@gmail.com.

We look forward to the evolution that this blog will no doubt undergo and hopefully inspire in everyone's palaeo art, and we hope you join us for it!

Site Administrator

Craig Dylke

Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Ceratopsians Gallery

Welcome to the first ever ART Evolved internet art carnival! Here on known as a gallery, or as per the theme of this site a "time-capsule".

We are proud to present the contributions of not only the new ART Evolved blogging team, but also submissions from many other palaeontology enthusiasts.
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Now as this is our first ever such gallery, and strict deadlines and/or cut offs would take the fun out of all this (as this is supposed to be nothing but fun!), we will be accepting and posting late entries whenever they should turn up. So be sure to check back every now and then to see what new pieces have popped up.
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Also for those of you who wish to add something to the so far rather impressive collection (which should only be made more impressive with your entry) you still can! Send them to artevolved@gmail.com with a title and desired text blurb, and we'll get them up as soon as we can!

So the Ceratopsians. To start off with they were of course Dinosaurs, a family from the Ornithischian branch of the Dinosaurian lineage.
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The Ceratopsians are most famous for many of their later members having impressive eye and nose horns coupled with spectacularly large shield-like frills. This was not always the case, and many did not have the horns and/or the frill. They all however had beaks which were a special bone called a rostral at the front of their jaw that no other animal has ever had! This is the key feature unifying the Ceratopsians, and the one palaeontologists use to i dentify them.
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Ceratopsians are generally thought of to have been herbivores, but a few scientists have recently suggesting there is a chance some of them were omnivores... Meaning there could be a major overhaul on how we view these animals if they are right!
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The Ceratopsians had a fairly late start for a major group of Dinosaurs at around 175-170 million years ago in the mid-Jurassic, but they lasted till the very end of the Dinosaurs reign 65 million years ago. They started off clearly in Asia, but as time progressed they radiated into North America, and possibly into Gondwana (Australia and South America have very partial Ceratopsian-like remains, but not enough to be certain one way or another).
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So let us now look into this time capsule from the Mesozoic to see what could have been...
Styracosaurus by Manabu Sakamoto
Pachyrhinosaurus by Nima Sassani
There is no real consensus on what this monsterlooked like, but one popular theory suggests that the huge bony terraceon its nose was the base of a huge horn or group of horns make ofkeratin - there's no evidence of the actualy horns, but if they were real, it would look like a Tyrannosaur's worst nightmare. The Royal Tyrell museum of Alberta has two statues of the speculative mega-horned Pachyrhinosaurus, so I decided to just go wild with this one and NOT stick to only the bones.
Styracosaurs by Angie Rodrigues
Styracosaurus by Nima Sassani
I drew this herd of Styracosaurus albertensis for thenewest issue of Prehistoric Times, which should be out soon. This isonly on an 8.5 x 11" paper and it took almost a month. A starkly patterned male faces down a predator (yeah, it's YOU!) while the rest of the clan heads to the river.

Centrosaurus by Manabu Sakamoto



Nine Centrosaurine Skulls Mo Hassan

The centrosaurines form a subfamily of the Ceratopsidae. Most have ornate, fenestrated frills, and the skulls are all fairly well-known. Albertaceratops is the most recently discovered, with beasts like Styracosaurus being relatively well-known amongst dinosaur fans.



"Grond" the Pachyrhino by Scott Elyard

A lovely Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis. It's name is taken from the pages of Tolkien, a reference that is quite appropriate indeed.




Skeletal Triceratops by Peter Bond


Psittacosaur Skeleton by Sean Craven


Psittacosaur Fleshed Out by Sean Craven

The Perfect Dinner! by Traumador the Tyrannosaur

In his piece of "modern art", the world's smallest (and most alive!) T-Rex gives us a theropod's point of view on the horned dinosaurs. Not really all that unexpected I guess.


Einiosaurus growth series by Zach Miller

The juvenile is based on Brachyceratops montanensis (Gilmore, 1917), and the subadult is, of course, a modified Monoclonius lowei (Sternberg, 1940). The adult is based mostly on Sampson (1995) but parts (mostly the frill) are taken from Carpenter (in Dodson, 1996). Species thanks go out to Andrew Farke for checking my work and sending me a ton of papers about centrosaurine ontogenetic development.
Now, let's talk about the piece itself. I was interested in showing a growth series of a centrosaurine ceratopsid because, frankly, they go through some significant changes.

Einiosaurus barely goes through anything compared to Pachyrhinosaurus, of course (Currie, et al. 2008). Awhile back, I remember seeing a painting of a drowning centrosaurine that was described as a "new species of Styracosaurus." I realize now that it was Einiosaurus, but the painting was from long ago. I could've sworn it was in the old Dinosaurs: Past and Present series, but I looked through both volumes and couldn't find the picture.

Einiosaurus is interesting it seems to represent the second step in a transitional series between Styracosaurus albertensis and Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis. Scott Sampson suggests that the encroachment of the Bearpaw Sea sparked a bit of an evolutionary revolution among Alberta and Montana's residents, including tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs.

The picture is also something of an achievement for me in that, aside from the initial sketches, everything you see here is digitally created with the help of my laptop, Wacom Bamboo "Fun" tablet, and Scott Elyard. The colors were unbelievably hard to decide on. In fact, the keen observer will note a complete lack of hue on the necks, because I couldn't decide on a good companion color the head maroon heads.

In addition to the growth (and reabsorbtion) of the horns and spikes, I've darkened the colors of the beak and horny sheaths as the animal ages. Were I to rework this picture in the future, I'd put some color on the necks and maybe toss a light background color in there. Ah, work for another day, I suppose.

References:
Gilmore, C. W. (1917). Brachyceratops, a ceratopsian dinosaur from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana with notes on associated reptiles. US Geological Survey Professional Paper 103: 1-45.
Sternberg, C. M. (1940). Ceratopsidae from Alberta. Journal of Paleontology 14: 468-480.

Sampson, S. (1995). Two new horned dinosaurs from the Upper Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana; with a phylogenetic analysis of the Centrosaurinae (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 15: 743-760.

Dodson, P. (1996). The Horned Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.

Currie, P. J. Langston, Jr., W., & Tanke, D. H. (2008). A New Horned Dinosaur From an Upper Cretaceous Bone Bed in Alberta. NRC Research Press: Ottawa, Canada.


Tug-o-War Duel by Craig Dylke
Inspired by the recent theory that the short frilled centrosaurids likely did not use their nasal horns in combat (unlike the long frilled chasmosaurids), here we have a pair of male Styracosaurus albertensis locking their frill horns and pulling against each other in a show of strength.
Though the recent paper purposing the difference between the two families suggests that the centrosaurids probably just competed against each other visually, I took the liberty of guessing an alternate route the Styracosaurus may have gone due to the crazy number of horns protruding off its head! You'll also note my conjectural quill projections on their tails inspired by Psittacosaurus'.
This piece was built entirely in 3D (forest and Dinosaurs), and than run through a rendering filter called TOON. The idea was to get a cartoon looking picture. The results aren't what I wanted at all, and I'm aiming play with it some more, but it was neat so I threw it in anyway.

Centrosaurus apertus by Peter Bond






Pachyrhinosaurus by Scott Elyard
 

Triceratops by Raven Amos
This curious critter was among the last of the great dinosaurs before the K-T extinction, and probably one of the world's most familiar, indeed synonymous with the word "dinosaur" to the average person. A great muscled hulk that seems part parrot, part angry, scaly cow, with a curious array of weaponry and sheilding. Apart from the large bony frill that did well at protecting the herbivore's jugular, Triceratops also sported several hard, bony scutes, impressions of which have been found in some fossil formations. 


Protoceratops by Sean Craven



Reunion by Mark Ryan

Two former foes from Montana meet again for the first time in 65 million years for a classic Cretaceous confrontation. (Science Museum of Minnesota, AMNH).


Introducing Sara Chasm by Glendon Mellow

Oil and digital, 2009. Title and concept inspired by Chasmosaurus, one of the ceratopsians. Glendon has blogged on the 'making of' this piece here.



Mud Bath by Zach Miller
A long time ago, when I was still doing steady work for the Alaska Museum of Natural History (it's rare now), I was asked to draw two cartoony pictures showing how an Alaskan dinosaur might make produce a fossil skin impression. A short flurry of concepts resulted in this happy little Pachyrhinosaurus taking a mud bath. The picture was never used, unfortunately, but it remains one of my personal favorites.

Agujaceratops by Ville Sinkkonen





Centrosaurine Phylogeny by Mo Hassan
This diagram shows the current thinking of the relationships between the members of the Centrosaurinae. There are two clear groups, and two that don't fit in. Avaceratops is believed to be the most basal member of this subfamily.

Chasmosaurus by Angie Rodrigues




Psittacosaur Creche by James Robins




Styracosaurus by Manabu Sakamoto

Protoceratops by Marek Eby

Psittacosaur by Raven Amos
While there is no direct evidence (and little supporting evidence) that Psittacosaurus sibiricus was either a) a quadraped or b) a digging animal, there is this fascinating proto-ceratopsid with a knobby skull, reminiscint of the warthogs of modern Africa, who do indeed dig mud wallows and root for tubers and roots. And with new evidence supporting that these dinosaurs were more "rotund" than previously hypothesized, the image sticks in my mind of this little pig-bodied, parrot-beaked reptile, studiously pawing the Early Cretaceous subtropical regions that are now Western Siberia, in search of roots, tubers, or a place in the mud to cool off.
Triceratops on the Beach by Peter Bond


Einiosaurus skull by Zach Miller

The adult bull began life as a skull restoration, as do most of my dinosaur drawings. The squamosal-parietal contact isn't exactly right, which I tried to fix in the final version.
Notice, of course, that the fossil skulls lack horns between the anterior base of the nasal horn and the rostrum. I tossed a "rostral comb" in because I figured that horn growth wouldn't just stop when the male reached a certain age. In modern horned ungulates, the horns keep growing throughout life. In dall sheep, the horns keep spiraling until death.

My philosophy with centrosaurines is that horn growth would continue like a sort of plague, with bumps and spikes appearing in more and more places with age, hence the little Pachyrhinosaurus-like triple spike on the center of the parietal.


Pipestone Crossing by Craig Dylke
A herd of Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai hit a fateful obstacle when they try to get across a flooding river. Some would survive, some would not. The rest is, well, shall we say Prehistory...

This piece was a two step effort. The first was creating the flood waters in an otherwise tranquil picture of a river bed. With the new raging river in place, ten 3D rendered Dinosaurs then had to be posed and positioned in relation to the photo, and than have splashs and trees composited back over top of them to integrate all the elements together.
Watch for a making of it here on ART Evolved in a week's time!


Diabloceratops eatoni by David Tana

Diabloceratops eatoni, a recently discovered/described centrosaurine from the Late Cretaceous of Utah. Pen and color pencil on paper.



Protoceratops by Vasika Udurawane



That sadly does it for our first time-capsule. Yet do not fear. We are opening a new one in two months time. So not only be sure to check back on May. 1st, but also please consider...

Set your pencils, pens, markers/felts, pencil crayons, charcoal, pastels, paints and brushes, clay, metal, pipe cleaners, paper mache, and/or computers to the task of recreating one of the most interesting and bizarre relatives of all us modern day mammals. The Synapsids, aka the proto-mammals, mammal-like reptiles, or stem-mammals.

We shall be putting up a post in a couple weeks time to help you out with some ideas of not only what sorts of animals were in this group, but also how palaeo-artists have previously tackled them.
Can't wait to see your submissions for it!