For those who wish to know, here are the steps I generally take when painting a dinosaur.  Sometimes I deviate from this template, but for the most part, it is accurate to my painting style.

    Step 1 The Choosing: This step is one of the hardest for me.  It involves looking at the vast mass of information which is the paleontological record of the Mesozoic and choosing one organism from it to represent.  Not any organism will do.  I must have a skeletal drawing (or a very accurate painting) of the the creature and the creature must be somewhat interesting to me. That still leaves literally hundreds of species and more are being described all the time.  Here, inspiration can come from a variety of sources.  In the case of Eoraptor, I looked for skeletal reconstructions in a book: The Complete Dinosaur (edited by James O. Farlow and M.K. Brett-Surman, published in 1997 by Indiana University Press).  Eoraptor is a bit generalized as a dinosaur, and has none of the frills of other dinosaurs, but it was a pleasant enough creature to draw.

    Step 2 Research: After I had pinpointed the dinosaur I was going to paint.  I researched it.  I looked through my dinosaur books and then searched the internet for more information about Eoraptor.  Sometimes, I take a trip to the library, but since I only go to the library once a week, I couldn't do that this time.

    Step 3 Inspiration: This is, with out a doubt, the hardest step in the process.   I know what dinosaur I am going to paint, but what am I going to make it do?  Depending on what shape and size the dinosaur is, I look at various paintings and photographs of living animals to get the inspiration required.  Photographs of birds from my birders magazines have proved helpful on many occasions, as have my own field sketches of animals in the wild or at zoos.  The works of Robert Bateman have also been very useful to me at certain times.  In the case of Eoraptor, the inspiration was a photograph of two little, Australian parakeets drinking from a pond.  They were cute and they would make good color templates for later.

    Step 4 Sketching: This is the part where I actually set pencil to paper.  I always make my sketch directly on the canvass (which is Aquarelle Arches: fine grain, cold pressed, and 100% cotton.  It's expensive stuff, but really great to paint on) and then paint over it.  One reason I do this because sometimes my pencil makes unconscious movements when sketching that turn out to be advantageous when I paint and would be lost if I made a sketch on regular paper and then redrew the thing on canvas.  The other reason is that it's a habit I've gotten into.  Anyway, with one eye on the inspiration photo and one on the skeletal reconstruction, I use a light pencil and make the first sketch.

There are a lot of messy pencil lines, and some of the proportions are wrong (the legs and tail are too long, I believe), but those things are fixed in the next step.

    Step 5 More Sketching: At this point, I put the inspiration away and take a good look at the skeleton.  I take a very sharp pencil (for Eoraptor, it's a mechanical pencil) and I draw in all of the muscles, wrinkles, and toes.  In Eoraptor, I noticed that the tail I drew was too long and the leg proportions weren't quite right.  I fixed those errors in this step.

I think there are still more errors and things to clean up, and those things will be taken in hand in the next step: painting.

    Step 6 First Coat: This is the step where I start to paint.  Although it is not necessary to have a complete picture of the exact colors of the dinosaurs, I usually know approximately what color I want them.  The first coat is when I apply this primal color and all other coats are just elaboration's on that color.  This is a pretty scattershot practice and in many paintings, I find that I don't like their color scheme half-way through and then start over.  In this case, I wanted my Eoraptors to be sky blue and green.  There was no particular reason, other then that the inspirational photograph, the parrots were blue and green.  Recently, I've been painting a lot of tan and brown dinosaurs, and sometimes I get sick of the earth tones and like to make something a little brighter.  My first application of blue was too dark, so I had to use white paint (great stuff) to lighten it up.  I liked the white/blue mixture so much I painted both Eoraptor in a mixture of blue and white with green along the spines.

    Step 7 Clean-Up Paint:  The first thing I do for this step is take a big eraser and erase all of the pencil marks that haven't been covered by paint (when I watercolor over the pencil marks, they no longer rub away when I try to erase them).  Then, I take a fine-tipped brush and paint all of the little shadows and ribs and things on the dinosaurs.  I also added little bits of red to the nose.  After the paint dries, I take the mechanical pencil, and add in the details that are too small to get with the brush.

    Step 8 Photoshop: In the final step of my painting, I save my painting to a disk and transfer it to another computer (this one a macintosh) so I can alter the picture in photoshop (photoshop came with the macintosh, but it won't transfer to an IBM, and it's the IBM that has the scanner and the internet).  At this point I add shadows and make the Eoraptors look three-dimensional.  Then, I transfer it back to the IBM and integrate it into my website.  To see the final image, click here.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

© Daniel Bensen 2000
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