I recently produced a short description of the geology of a farm located in the mountains north of where I live. The document was used to design a field outing for tourists and for local teenagers to educate them on aspects of the local natural history.
I realized that one way to engage young people is to introduce that magic work, dinosaurs, to the conversation. In reality there are traces of dinosaurs in the area. Certain formations have yielded fossil bones attributed to a number of different species that inhabited the region.
I introduced the dinosaur history in the text of the second edition of my geological guide, but thought that some illustration would to accompany the text would engage the attention of the reader.
One of the fossil animals is a type of dinosaur identified as Ornithomimids. These were animals that resemble modern day large birds such as the ostrich. I began my work by looking in illustrated books at drawings produced by paleo artists to see what these animals were thought to look like.
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| Artist impressions of dinosaurs (From: Dixon, 2016, The complete illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures) |
I then found a diagram of the anatomy of dinosaurs that were very similar in stature and overall body form to the Ornithomimid type dinosaurs. In fact, all these images remind me of the modern bird anatomy.
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| Dinosaur anatomy (From: Witton, 2018, The Palaeoartists handbook) |
I tried to create my own unique image without resorting to copying the existing art work of these animals. I like to at least try for some originality, and also challenge myself to create something a little on the edge of my capability. After a few attempts I realized that this was not feasible, my imagination was defeated. So, I resorted to the next best thing, a model.
I drew a top and side view of my imagined animal and used these profiles as the basis to build a small model from scrap paper. Construction began by emulating the main body mass with a pair of box structures, one for the pelvis and one for the rib cage. These were joined by a log strip of paper that served as the backbone or spine. I then glued arms, legs, and a tail onto this box arrangement. Finally, I constructed a third small box to represent the head, this was glued on the end of the spinal paper strip. To stop the head sagging from its relative weight I added a second strip running up vertically across the chest region to raise the head. The whole arrangement is then mounted on a toothpick that can be inserted into a suitable support. In this case another box like form.
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| Paper model used for creating the drawing |
Once I had the paper model to look at it was relatively easy to envisage how the animal would look as it bounded across the landscape. It probably did bound at considerable speed. I think that is the case because they had a very lightweight anatomy, long legs, and very efficient respiratory systems.
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| Final rough sketch of the dinosaur |
Above is the completed sketch. I just created it as an experiment on scrap A4 paper. What remains to be done is the creation of a fine copy of the image for inclusion in the second edition.
The artistic point of this post is to illustrate how one can move from what you imagine to something tangible that can be represented on paper. I suspect the biggest barrier to doing this is the translation of aspects of a form in our imagination into to the coherent image required to convey the idea to others.
Below is an additional rework of the image shown above, I did this to serve as an illustration in a geology guide I have written about a local farm.
