Making of Arambourgiania Family Unit: Composition

Arambourgiania Family Unit by Peter Bond

The Pterosaur Gallery was quite a success with some amazing pieces of Art. I thought I'd take a minute now and show you how I created "Arambourgiania Family Unit" and used digital tools to finalize it's composition.

After doing a quick image search online, I found that there was a lack of pterosaur baby restorations. Probably due to a lack of pterosaur baby fossils! Thus I had a mission. After doing some research, I decided on a family unit of two adults and three hatchlings. And to create the composition of the piece, I thought I'd use a technique Glendon (of the Flying Trilobite) used to create a web banner - done through manipulating painted elements in Photoshop.

First, I created the separate elements using acrylic paints on paper:

Background

Adult Pterosaur 1

Adult Pterosaur 2

Baby Pterosaurs

With each element a layer, I used Photoshop to experiment with the composition of the piece. Moving each one left and right, up and down, blurring them, enhancing the colour, contrast and brightness. I went through quite a few versions before I was happy with the final result:

Composition #1

Composition #2

Composition #3

Composition #4

And Composition #5, the final completed piece that I was happy with.

Having the freedom to move and manipulate each individual element of the reconstruction really helped get a final composition I liked. As discussed on Glendon's post, the final result is something digital, ethereal. Even though I can't just put it up on a wall like a regular painting, I really like the amount of control one has over an image. Did I make the right compositional choice? Which do you like?

Now it's time to sit down and get the Anomalocaris ideas flowing...