The Odds and Ends #1 Gallery

Some have wondered what would happen if they submitted pieces of art past a gallery's deadline. Up until today we couldn't have told you precisely, however due to a buildup of a few such pieces we finally came up with a solution today.


Welcome to an intern gallery here at ART Evolved, the first odds and ends gallery.


As the old saying goes "better late then never", here are the many pieces that have been sent our way that were a bit past their galleries postings (and deadlines). We apologize to their respective artists for them taking this long to be put up. There was some minor debate within the ART Evolved Executive as to the best way to get them up in a fashion that would be noticed by our sites visitors. Now that we have finalized this as a format they won't be this delayed in the future!

We had two galleries for which late submissions were received...

Here are a few late entries we received for our horned dinosaur gallery. For the original gallery click here.

Einosaurus by Matt Tames

Styracosaurus by Teddy Cookswell

Styracosaurus vs. Daspletosaurus by Teddy Cookswell





Styracosaurus Walk by Teddy Cookswell

Styracosaurus by Brian Blacknick

This is a sculpture of a Styracosaur I was commissioned to make for a stop motion film maker. In his film he is going to have raptors feeding on the thigh area.

We also had several interesting submissions sent in for the...

It would seem the Permian Synapsids capture a great deal of people's alternate reality/past imagination, as there was a submission in the original gallery of a similar speculative nature.

All the following submissions come from ART Evolved's own Raven Amos, and she explains these creations as...

"Years ago, I came up with my own race called the Ghrendali - a race of sentient therapsids that live on a planet orbiting the star Delta Draconis (also known as Altais, Nodus Secundus, or Aldib). I had done several sketches in the past and still don't know what to do with them - in high school, I made a D&D (Second Ed.) module with maps of their planet, custom class descriptions...indeed, I was half-way through with having an entire book dedicated to them in D&D form. Alas, time is not kind and all of that stuff was on a very old computer which inevitably fried before I left for college in 2000. All that's left is their ghosts, echoes of their digital being, trapped until I can create their world anew. Perhaps one day, I will."

Enjoy!

Ghrendali in Colour by Raven Amos



Ghrendali Dancing by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Pensive by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Skull by Raven Amos

Ghrendali Posed by Raven Amos

A Helping Hand

It is now time, here at ART Evolved, for a long overdue Thank You to Dr. Jerry Harris, the Director of Paleontology at the Dixie State College in Utah. You might have wondered where we got the incredible list of Paleoartist Sites and Resources in the right sidebar. Check them out! Well it so happens that seven months ago, Dr. Harris kindly sent us the links.

He is currently researching the sauropod Suuwassea emilieae (Dinosauria: Sauropoda: Flagellicaudata) from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation of Montana. I'm sure Dr. Harris will be quite interested in November's Sauropod Gallery!

Again, a huge prehistoric Thank You to Dr. Harris form the ART Evolved Community!

The making of "Once Upon A Claw"

Before things get all Sauropody around here, thought I'd throw up a quick post about one of my 4 pieces for the Anomalocarid gallery.

The piece in question is "Once Upon a Claw". This is the second piece from this year I'm quite proud of. The first being of course "Karoo Sunset", and another of my Anomalocaris pieces "The First Great Predator" has this becoming a trend. I'm not used to being happy with my pieces, so this success that ART Evolved has been motivating me towards is most welcome!

You can get a close up look at the details here (for some reason blogger tends to not allow zoom ins on pics I upload), and frankly I put so much work into them I insist you check them out.


There was no single trick to the making Once Upon a Claw, and in fact no tricks at all really. Just a lot of fine detail modelling and composing. The success of this piece is not any single brilliant element, but rather the combination of several alright ones (supplemented by a few substandard ones too). This being in the 3D modelling, their texturing, lighting, and placement.

This little slide show takes you through the 8 days of its creation.

Lastly I thought I'd introduce you to the population of the claw individually.

One of the first things I added were these "Brachiopods". Up close they are probably the weakest of my elements as they are actually clams, but the texture gives them a Brachiopod like look far away.

I could probably get away with calling them clams as primitive ones are known from the Cambrian, but realistically they were uncommon and rare. The early Paleozoic was the heyday of the Brachiopods so I'm sticking with them as my desired outcome. I just didn't do a great job on them! If I were ever hired to do a similar piece, I'd have taken the extra time to tweak these into proper Brachiopods (making a calm was easier!).

It was when I built this Hallucigenia that I actually started work on Once Upon a Claw. I'd been toying with the idea of a scene full of discard Anomalocaris claws, but had abandoned it when I had trouble coming up with a way to show a claw that'd been on the seafloor forever (it needed to be matted and disappearing under algae and other growth). I suddenly had the idea of instead showing a single claw and how all the other lifeforms of the Burgess Shale were assimilating it into a new habitat.

My Hallucigenia is quite functional, and I especially like the stylized spines on the back. I did neglect the hose like nose on the front end, but honestly that could be remedied in about 1 minute of modelling. So I don't consider it a big issue.

I then grabbed my old 2004 Raydream (3D program... precursor to Carrara that I use now) era Yohoia model to flesh out the population early in the pieces development. I reasoned if I could get an early sense of life around my claw then I'd start snowballing on the creativity. My thinking was correct, and I quickly started doing a lot of new modelling after grabbing this old model.

As the Yohoia wasn't going to be a central element in the piece itself, I opted to merely update its shaders and otherwise use it as was. From far away it looks just like it should. Up close though, it looks like an amateur's model (which it is). Making it another thing I'd put more time into if it with a "real" piece.

The giant predatory worm Ottoia was my first "modern" Burgess model, though to be fair I did build it last year (making it old skool compared to my modern efforts). Worms are pretty darned easy, and I won't be boasting much about it, other then the shaders. I'm quite pleased with getting segmentations without have to build them into the worm's actual model (which would have made posing it a nightmare!).

I needed something for the worm to eat, and so I had my choice of the dozen or so obscure tiny Arthropods from the Burgess Shale to choose from. I ended up picking Habelia simply because in Stephen Gould's amazing book Wonderful Life the drawing by Marianne Collins was such a fantastic reference for me to work from.

Despite it almost being a cameo model, it is one I'm most proud of. I not only paid attention to most of the details (apart from gills... which admittedly I'd need to add for a more legit piece) but I rigged the model for posing and possible animation. As a final touch I put a lot of effort into making sure the shader gave this guy camouflage on my sea floor.

Though the piece didn't need it to be complete, I HAD to build a 3D Leanchoilia as it is one of my all time favourite Burgess critters (here it is eating one of my others Yohoia!). So I figured why not put it in this piece. In the end it actually served an important purpose of framing the claw with life, and thus making use of all the space I had towards the top.

I'm split on this model. The arms and tentacles are a big achievement in model rigging. They are all rigged as one unified piece, and I can move the arm as a whole or just manipulate any of the 6 tentacles individually. However the back end of the body needs more work, and the shaders aren't great. So I may revisit him at some point.

Put all these critters together along with the sponges, borrows, algae, ground, and most important Anomalocaris claw models, shade these all, and finally light them we end up with Once Upon A Claw.

EARTH Magazine ART Evolved Article is ONLINE!

The ART Evolved article is now available to read in it's entirety as the featured story on EARTH Magazine's website!


Click here for a direct link to the article, featuring not only the interview with Craig and myself, but also Glendon, Zach, Craig and my artwork. Special thanks to Carolyn Gramling and EARTH Magazine for making our article available online!

Art Evolved in EARTH Magazine

In the September 2009 issue of EARTH Magazine, you can find a two-page profile of Art Evolved by Carolyn Gramling. There is artwork by Zach Miller, Glendon Mellow (me) and Art Evolved founders Craig Dylke and Peter Bond. There's a nice interview with Craig and Peter as well. Manubu Sakamoto is also mentioned. That's our headline there on the cover: Paleo-artists get creative.

We're a big group, and I suppose editorial and space restraint can't include every one of our contributors, and it's some great press for all of us at Art Evolved, and what we're all about. The article clearly mentions the diversity of artwork you can find here, and that makes me thrilled! We should all take a bow and eat cookies, and thanks to Craig and Peter for bringing us together.

The Anomalocaridid Gallery

It's time for...

One of the most unusual sets of animals to have ever existed on our planet, the Anomalocaridids. They were so bizarre in fact, that each of the various parts of them that were found in isolation were thought to be separate organisms.

Despite clearly being related to Arthropods, they are too different to be included in that group. Modern thinking places them in the phylum Lobopodia, the group from which all hard shelled Arthropods are believed to have evolved from.

They were the dominate predators of the early Cambrian, with remains known from this time period all across the world. Despite losing this apex position in the food chain the family group would survive 100 million years into the Devonian where they appear to have finally met with extinction.

So come now and meet, Stephen Gould's "bizarre wonders" of early complex life...

Silhouette of an Icon by Craig Dylke

Since I was retooling my Anomalocaris model for this gallery anyway, I thought I might as well retool my most popular image on the internet, with this anatomically improved version of the piece.

Deadly Stalkers of a Crystal Sea by Nima Sassani

A few hundred miles south of what would become the Burgess shale, two Anomalocaris saron are on the hunt for soft-bodied prey, ignoring an armored Helmetia, the trilobite Brachyaspidion, and several small arthropods. Also present are Sanctacaris and Hallucigenia, and I'll let everyone guess what everything else is :)

Hurdia & Aysheaia by Rachael Revelle

The First Great Predator by Craig Dylke

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An Anomalocaris plunges into a swarming school in the water high above the Burgess Shale. Despite its size advantage and the inherent speed this would grant it, the Anomalocaris still must work to snatch one of these active swimming creatures from the school. These other animals include the small enigmatic Nectocaris, common Canadaspis, and the large Odaraia.

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The inspiration for this piece was a desire to see an active depiction of Burgess life. Life in both senses, the organisms and how they lived their lives. Normally pictures of the Burgess Shale tend to show small numbers of these animals in relatively calm subdued interactions (sometimes due to philosophic beliefs about primitive life, as discussed by Gould in Wonderful Life, and others for visual simplicity to not overwhelm the viewer). I wanted something that felt like a still from a nature documentary, and also told a story.

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Sadly much of the detail is lost in the small version so please be sure to check out a larger version here.
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Anomalocaris and the Burgess Shale by Peter Bond

A predator on the hunt, amongst the rich diversity of the shallow Canadian Cambrian waters. This piece was created in one long 13-hour session on August 17th, and documented through live-blogging on Bond's Blog. For a behind-the-scenes look at it's creation, click here.

Anomalocarid Dress sketch (A work in progress) by Glendon Mellow

For a long while now I've had an idea to do a series of Precambrian-inspired clothing. Anomalocaris is supposed to be (in my mind) similar to the whole preying mantis/black widow/femme fatale aesthetic. I had a model pose for me, I especially wanted to capture the shoulders. Apparently, that is quite an uncomfortable combination of hip and neck tilts.

Terror of the Reef by Craig Dylke

A lone Anomalocaris lurks over a "forest" of sponges. Vauxia being the cactus like ones (anyone know the bowl shaped on is called again?).

I created this picture with the idea of shrinking Anomalocaris, by showing it in its environment. In most versions of the Burgess Shale as in books and the web, Anomalocaris is made out to be an unfathomable giant, which granted for its time it was in comparison, but yet no animal comes close to dwarfing its environment. I wanted a piece that showed the first super predator as the tiny thing it was...

Anomalocaris canadensis by Mo Hassan

A quick and simple felt-pen sketch of a single Anomalocaris canadensis in three different views.

Oddity of the Devonian by Peter Bond

A Schinderhannes, the surprising Devonian Anomalocarid, painted in water colour in the 30 minutes leading up to this gallery's posting.

Once Upon a Claw by Craig Dylke

More than 90-95% (probably more like 98-99%, but I'm no expert) Anomalocaris fossils come in the form of shed, molted, or broken off pieces of them. Most of these being their large clawed tentacle like arms. With such an abundance of these being preserved in the fossils record, to me, this suggests they were quite a common occurrence on the sea floor of the Cambrian.

Since early life wasn't smothered to extinction in these discarded claws, it stands to reason that they must have served some sort of positive ecological role to Cambrian reefs. This piece is how I envision such claws being assimilated and utilized by Cambrian communities. A illustration to the powerful irony of nature, one day your the greatest killer around and the next your the greatest giver of life!

Please be sure to check out the larger version of this piece to see more of the detail.

Anomalocaris Regret by Peter Bond

The next morning, Mr. Anomalocaris wakes feeling regret as memories of the party celebrating Burgess Shale's Centenary the night before flood back to him...

 

 Amplectobelua symbrachiata by David Tana

Amplectobelua symbrachiata, a Cambrian anomalocaridid that despite being one of the smaller members of its clade, was still a giant compared to the animals it preyed upon.  

 Pencil on paper, scanned, colored in Adobe Photoshop

That wraps up our journey back to the deep past of the Cambrian. Be sure to join us in two months time for...


The Sauropods...
Remember to send in those submissions to our email artevolved@gmail.com (with any desired accompanying text blurb and your website or blog's link), and watch out for plenty of Sauropod discussion and "making of"s for this gallery's Anomalocarises.

November's Upcoming Gallery

Just barely pulling a head, in a neck and neck race (pun intended :P) on our gallery opinion poll, the Sauropods beat out Terror Birds by a slim margin.

Meaning Novemeber's gallery will be none other then...

The colossal long necked Sauropods! Who probably don't need much of an introduction. Being though, that we love to talk all things palaeo here on ART Evolved, be prepared in the upcoming two months for plenty of discussion on all things Sauropod, and given that they were the largest animals to ever walk the Earth they should give us some big topics to engage!

So if your a palaeo-artist or just a Dinosaur enthusiast, throw together a restoration of a Sauropod in any medium you'd like and send it our way (artevolved@gmail.com). We will post any and all submissions we receive. Just make sure to include your name (for the credit), any text you want accompanying/explaining the piece, and the link for your website or blog for our visitors to check out.

Happy Birthday Burgess Shale

100 years ago, history was made.

100 years ago, Charles Walcott discovered something.

100 years ago - almost to the day - the first fossils from the Burgess Shale were found.

The Burgess Shale, one of the world's most famous fossil sites, was first discovered on August 30, 1909 by Charles Walcott on the flanks of Mt. Stephen, British Columbia. The creatures found amongst the shale have fundamentally changed our understanding of evolution and the history of early life on this Planet. For more informationon this amazing discovery, see here and here.

While most of us understand the significance of the Burgess Shale, there is another significance to the date, August 30. We are quickly approching the 100th year aniversary of Walcott's discovery of the first Burgess Shale fossil. Sunday, in fact. Sunday is the 100th Anniversary of the fossil site's discovery, and Tuesday is the opening of ART Evolved's Anomalocaridid Gallery Time Capsule. Neat, huh?

Photo credit: Yukio Sato. Cover of Simon Conway Morris' book The Crucible of Creation, minus the hat.

This lovely convergence of the space-time continuum allows us to celebrate Burgess Shale's centenary through the eyes of Anomalocaris and friends! Join us in the celebration by creating and sending in your birthday card, birthday cake, or drunk Burgess party photos!

Creative Spaces: Where the Magic Happens!

Every artist needs their workspace - their place to be creative, to experiment, to produce. Their Creative Space.



One of our illustrious members, a certain Sean Craven, has opened his creative doors and offered us a tour of his studio. What an adventure! In fact, he has invited all other artists to join him in showing their creative spaces, and we said ya! It is a rare opportunity to see the inner workings of actual artists. Here is your invitation!

Artist's Creative Spaces:

• Sean Craven 1, 2, 3, and 4
  
• Glendon Mellow
• Peter Bond
• Craig Dylke
  

Post your creative space on your blog and we will add it to the list above!