I was one of those lucky kids who didn’t “outgrow” my fondness for dinosaurs, or drawing them, as I grew older. They are amazing animals in many ways, and their variation in size, wildly bizarre appearance and astonishingly exaggerated forms make them as much of a delight to draw now as they did when I was 10.

The Gnomon Workshop, a video-based offshoot of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, is now offering an instruction al DVD called Drawing Dinosaurs: Anatomy and Sketching with David Krentz.

Krentz was the lead character designer on Disney’s Dinosaur, a disappointing movie with great character design and effects. (My understanding is that the original plan was to do it wordlessly, like an updated version of the terrific dinosaur sequence in Fantasia, which would have worked great, but Eisner insisted that the dinosaurs talk and have cutsie mammal companions).

Krentz is also a founding member of Ninth Ray Studios, a concept and production art group that includes Iain McCaig, Ryan Church and other major concept artists. In addition to his work on Dinosaur, Krentz has worked on titles like Fantasia 2000, Treasure Planet, Spider-Man 2, The Ant Bully, John Carter of Mars and Eragon.

Krentz is also a dinosaur sculptor, and has a site devoted to his small scale sculptures, of which he sells limited edition castings. His main web site has galleries of his concept art and illustrations for movies and games, as well as examples of his story boards from Dinosaur and John Carter of Mars. There is also a nice gallery of six images on the Gnomon Workshop page for the DVD, in addition to the stills from the video.

It’s interesting to note that his credits include story boards and animatics for Eragon, the new movie that prominently features dragons. Our long history of a fascination with dragons in various cultures just shows that if dinosaurs didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.

Link via PALEOBLOG