I pulled the image from Theropoda, my file's on the other machine and I'm far to lazy today to pull it. I drew this for Steve Brusatte over the summer, the paper came out today, so this is my first actual scientific art for a paper. Coolness;)
Thanks agian to Steve for letting me do this, it was quite fun:)
Best,
Brett
Posts
Congratulations, Brett.
ReplyDeleteSteve sent me the paper and I've decided to publish your picture: its' very good!
Thanks Andrea,
ReplyDeleteSteve mentioned you posted it right away, you had it posted before I even got his email! LOL!
Nice! Can you talk a bit about the process involved? How much direction did you receive? Did you work from the source bones?
ReplyDeleteSure thing David,
ReplyDeleteSteve sent me a basic images with all the skull parts in their proper place but not scaled. I would love to have seen the actual fossils but they are in China and I hate to travel;)
I scaled everything in photoshop and placed it in the proper position, drawing a base skull which we modified a bit. We had a problem with the brain case elements, the original scale bar was a bit off so the ball joint in the back of the skull kept comming down into the throat of the animal, not right. I had a problem getting the braincase put back together since it was just a side shot, even thought I draw 2D I still visualize in 3D;) We went back and forth with incrimental changes, Steve finally showed me some addition pictures and then everything clicked and we got the base version which was all done in photoshop. Once that was done I printed the skull out and then traced the basic outline and any prominate features to make sure they were in the right place (normally I'm not a tracing guy, I feel it's cheating a bit but this was science and not for my entertainment.) After that I went in and did the details with pencil. I used all the carcharadontosaur skull reference I had, from Eocarcharia to Carcharadontosaurus to Acrocanthosaurus and Mapusaurus.
Once the pencils were done and approved I put it back into Photoshop to add the tones. The drawing took about 2 hours or so, I don't usually do technical stuff anymore and I had to keep it simple and not noodle it, but other than that it was a blast! It was the highlite of my rather boring summer:)
Best,
Brett
Congrats dude, sounds exciting.
ReplyDeleteIt was a good question by david, thanks for taking the time!