I don’t often talk about my own work here on Lines and Colors, but every once and a while there’s something interesting enough to mention.

I was particularly pleased when I learned that my dinosaur mix and match iPhone app DinoMixer was given a very nice review this morning on Wired.

The review, Build Your Own Dinosaurs With DinoMixer, is by Jonathan Liu and is on Wired’s GeekDad blog. GeekDad is a fascinating and always well written blog about technology, science and related topics, ostensibly aimed at parents, but really of interest to anyone who still has a inner child (grin).

DinoMixer is an iPhone app for which I created the concept, art and design, and partnered with Leon Stankowski of Mobomia, who did the programming.

I wrote a previous article about my experience creating art for the app: DinoMixer: on creating art for an iPhone app, and I’ve since created the design and illustration for another iPhone app called MonsterMixer.

There is a web site for DinoMixer here. You can also see some of the DinoMixer illustrations on my CafePress T-shirt store for Dinosaur Cartoons. I’ll soon be adding them to a similar Zazzle T-shirt store for Dinosaur Cartoons (and perhaps be reporting on the relative value of each).

The GeekDad review was nice not only for the positive comments, but for the helpful suggestions (like adding an audio pronunciation of the dinosaur names). Creating something like an iPhone app is in many ways similar to the creation of an individual illustration or other artwork, a process of learning and refinement, constantly striving to get better.

But, also like illustration and other art, it’s nice when you get some positive feedback.

This post finds me simultaneously elated and frustrated.

I’m elated because, like many other fans of William Stout’s paleontological illustrations, I’ve been waiting several decades for a suitable follow-up to his terrific 1981 book The Dinosaurs. (There was an expanded update, The New Dinosaurs in 2000, that was welcome, but not the same as a new book.)

A beautiful book of Stout’s Prehistoric Life Murals for the San Diego Museum of Natural History was released last year; but as much as I enjoyed that book, it still wasn’t the follow up to The New Dinosaurs, that I and many others have been hoping for.

The reason for that is that the murals, as striking as they are, are direct paintings, but the illustrations for The New Dinosaurs were in a style that is unusual for paleo art, but at which Stout particularly excels.

Most dinosaur art is either fully painted, or monochromatic pen and ink (there are exceptions, of course, like Douglas Henderson’s wonderful charcoal drawings); but the majority of Stout’s images for The New Dinosaurs were pen and ink with watercolor. This approach has all of the visual charm of Stout’s refined pen and ink work, combined with a beautiful application of color.

Pen and ink with watercolor is an approach that I enjoy in general, but particularly in the case of Stout’s application of it to images of dinosaurs, in which the textures of the animals and their environments are ideal subjects for the style.

(I like this approach so much that I used it, or a digital variation of it, for my own dinosaur illustrations for my dinosaur themed iPhone app; but I’m nowhere near Stout’s degree of mastery.)

The good news is that Flesk Publications, a small publisher that specializes in superbly produced books on art, illustration and comics (and which printed the aforementioned book of Stout’s paleo murals) has released not one but two absolutely beautiful new books of William Stout dinosaur art, Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The first is the true long-awaited successor to The New Dinosaurs, surpassing it in many ways. Beautifully produced in the tradition Flesk has established, Stout’s prehistoric pen and ink and watercolor marvels just jump off the page. It showcases 61 new dinosaurs that have been discovered in the last 20 years.

The hardback is a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the artist with a bound-in plate not published in the subsequent paperback edition.

The second book is a smaller edition in which some of the material from the larger volume has been elegantly arranged into an A-Z children’s dinosaur book. While it shares content with the larger volume, Stout fans will want both, as they present the material differently enough to not seem redundant (plus they’re just so wonderfully designed and printed).

You can read publisher John Fleskes’ account of The Process behind the New Stout Books on his blog.

Though Amazon lists the books as not yet released, all three (New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z and the hardbound and softbound editions of Dinosaur Discoveries) are available now from the Flesk Publications web site, as well as William Stout’s site.

OK, so why the part about being frustrated when Dinosaur Discoveries is, indeed, the Stout paleo art book I’ve been waiting for all these years?

Well, my frustration centers on my limited ability to point you to images from the books. Neither Flesk or Stout have seen fit to show a gallery of work from the books on the web, though there are a few scattered images you can look at.

I know that both artists and publishers have concerns about images (particularly terrific dinosaur images) being “borrowed” and spread around the web; but if you want to sell these books, you should let people know how great they look (with some detail images, come on)!

Anyway, below is what I can find on the Flesk site; but the best, and largest, images I can point you to (short of the books themselves, of course) are to be found in a download the Flesk Catalog from the right hand column of the Flesk site’s home page (from which I extracted the detail image above, bottom).

In the meanwhile, I’m happily camping out in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and my copy of Dinosaur Discoveries.

Yesterday’s more or less paleontology art themed post (DinoMixer: on creating art for an iPhone app) reminded me that I have been wanting for some time to write a post about Chezk artist Zdeněk Burian, a pioneering paleontological reconstruction artist, natural history painter and book and magazine illustrator.

Zdeněk Burian (pronounced, according to William Stout via Jim Vadeboncoeur: “Zeh-DEN-yeck BURR-ee-yahn”), was, along with Charles R. Knight and Rudolph Zallinger, one of the most influential paleontological artists in the history of the field.

His detailed compositions showed prehistoric landscapes populated by fantastical animals that were simultaneously dramatic and, given the scientific knowledge at the time, painstakingly accurate. In spite of their attention to scientific detail, his paintings are lively, colorful and painterly, often with dramatic skies alive with roiling clouds.

Many of his dinosaur paintings have become iconic, well known even beyond the paleo art community; and he created images of many other periods of prehistoric life, including prehistoric mammals, extinct giant birds, ancient seas, early humans and human ancestors.

Burian studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts in Prague and begain selling illustrations while still in his second year, though not successfully enough to support himself or to prevent dropping out of school. Taking up odd jobs to support himself, he continued his own study, working on “adventure illustrations’ and eventually getting work illustrating western adventure fiction.

He was apparently not only prolific, but quite fast, a fact that was exploited by unscrupulous publishers, who demanded much and paid little.

Burian’s early interest in prehistoric life and paleontology, fueled in part by an admiration for Charles R. Knight’s paintings, bloomed when he partnered with paleontologist Josef Augusta to do prehistoric life reconstructions that provided art for numerous books, articles and museum exhibits.

It’s estimated that Burian created over 15,000 works — drawings in various media, paintings and illustrations, including illustrations for over 500 books.

Burian’s work was not widely seen outside Czechoslovakia until the 1960’s, when a series of books, many of them aimed at a popular audience, were published in the U.S. A number of his books are still available in various states of new or used.

Those who are mostly familiar with modern images of prehistoric animals, particularly dinosaurs, will find his images of upright iguanodons, tail-dragging tyrannosaurs and and giant sauropods with languorously curved necks and ground-hugging tails oddly quaint, but they were rigorously correct according to the best paleontological reconstructions of the day (interpretations of the appearance of long-extinct animals based on fragmentary fossilized bones, trackways and bone fragments is a constantly shifting landscape, new evidence is literally being uncovered daily).

What doesn’t get outdated, however, is Burian’s command of painting technique, his dramatic compositions, evocative landscapes and viscerally tactile suggestions of the textures of prehistoric life.

William Stout, himself a paleo artist of note (see my posts on William Stout) has published a Zdenek Burian Sketchbook – Volume One: Prehistoric Life, a nice companion to his Charles R. Knight Sketchbooks (here’s a mention of both on Paleoblog).

Regular readers will know that I rarely feature my own projects or work on Lines and Colors, but once in a while I’ll be indulgent (as on my birthday, which happens to be today), particularly if I have a project going that is of interest.

I tend to be involved in many things — web site design, web comics, Flash animation, cartooning, sketching and painting, among others.

I also have a long running fascination with dinosaurs and paleontological art. Recently, I had the opportunity to combine several of those skill sets and interests; and, along with a two friends of mine, programmer Leon Stankowski and artist/sound designer Bruce Gulick, created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you ever wanted to put a tyrannosaurus head on a pachycephalosaurus body and add a stegosaurus tail — there’s an app for that!   It’s called DinoMixer.

DinoMixer is an amusement, in which kids and dinosaur art fans of all ages can mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make crazy mixed-up dinosaurs, or un-mix them to match up the real dinosaurs.

I designed the app and did the illustration for it, which proved to be an interesting process.

Any form of illustration has its intended method of final display, from paperback book cover to CD jewel-box to computer monitor to console game screen. The iPhone is its own display paradigm.

If you haven’t seen one in person, the screen is very nice, it’s 480×320 pixels displayed in a relatively small area, so the the actual pixels-per-inch resolution is sharper than most computer displays (160ppi vs 103ppi or less for monitors) and the color is excellent; so even though the screen is small, the image is detailed and sharp. It’s a nice platform to do art for.

I had to do a little digging to find out the preferred image format. Though the iPhone will display a variety of image files, PNG is the native image file-type for the device. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an underrated and terrific image format that allows both a wide color gamut of millions of colors and a full channel of alpha transparency.

Beyond those basics, though, I had given myself a challenge simply in the design of my particular app. To make the dinosaur parts match up, I had to divide the screen proportions into a grid, one that would accommodate the disparate body sizes and shapes of the various animals, and allow them to meet up at critical junctures where the illusion of joining them together could be accomplished. In addition, I wanted the dinosaurs to be relatively large on the screen, and use the small area to best advantage.

Fortunately, I’ve had this idea in one form or another percolating in my brain pan for several years (originally intended as a web feature, in dHTML or Flash), so the grid was a matter of adaptation to the iPhone screen proportions and refinement. But it was still quite a challenge to draw the animals so that they fit the grid, matched against one another and still retained a degree of scientific accuracy (there is no one quicker to notice discrepancies than a 10-year old dinosaur fan).

Once the dinosaurs were penciled to fit within the grid, I inked them, and in saying “penciled” or “inked”, I’m speaking of the digital equivalents, using a Wacom tablet and Corel Painter. I then applied digitally painted color and texture using Painter and Photoshop, in much the same method as I have used for the 15 years I’ve been doing my Argon Zark! digital web comic.

The use of ink lines filled with color wasn’t just a choice from my comfort with the technique, but vital, I realized, to producing the sense of unity necessary to make the dinosaur “mixes” work — the outlines connect precisely at their juncture points and form a whole.

I also took pains to blend the colors to an extent. While I wanted the colors of the dinosaurs to vary, to provide eye-pleasing variety, I also wanted some relationship between them. Though it’s difficult to see in the reduced resolution images, I found that working multiple colors into each dominant color, a technique often used by painters to produce overall harmony, was useful in giving the different colored dinos a bit of additional visual “glue”. Each of the dominant colors had accents and highlights of several of the other dominant colors within them.

In addition, I had to design a background that would showcase the animals and also connect them to the ground with a shadow, one that would meet the feet of all of the different shaped dinosaurs and serve as a universal shadow for all of them.

Lastly, I was not just creating illustrations that mixed and matched with one another, I was creating an application, and interface, with room for branding and functional controls, and the images had to work within that.

The final images, in particular the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails, had to be saved out as set-sized PNG files with transparent backgrounds, that would line up precisely with one another and allow the background to be seen behind them.

I created the original art at a much higher resolution than the target screen (3000 x 2000 pixels), both to give myself lots of leeway in creating detailed art, and to allow for repurposing the images (perhaps for T-shirts or other uses). I do the same with my web comic, create the original art at many times its intended display size.

10 dinosaurs (divided into 30 parts), a background, splash screen, nav bar and application icon later, I’m happy to say the resulting app works well, and has been getting good reviews. The seemingly simple premise took a lot of work (I conservatively estimate 200+ hours just on my part), but part of that was uptake on learning how to design and publish an iPhone app.

You can see the DinoMixer web site here, which includes screen shots as well as a short video, and those who use iTunes can see the DinoMixer app page in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes).

I just submitted a new upgrade version of DinoMixer (v1.1) to the App Store yesterday, with features that include an additional dinosaur, multiple backgrounds and a dinosaur name box that pops up when you match a dinosaur correctly. If all goes well, it should make its way through the App Store approval process and be released in about a week.

Like many iPhone and iPod Touch apps, DinoMixer will be contine be upgraded with free revisions that add features and functionality. In my case, I’ll be drawing and adding new dinosaurs and backgrounds (as well as other features) for weeks to come. I can also update or revise the existing art whenever I want to invest the time and effort. It’s an illustration project with no set end or limit, something that makes it particularly appealing.

We live in a wonderfully weird world, in which life has taken forms more spectacularly bizarre and varied than the imaginings of any fantasy or concept artist (which, given the talents of many of those amazing artists, is saying something).

Nature has provided us with a record of some of the wildest experiments of the past, most notable among them might be the dinosaurs, which have captured the public’s imagination since the first artistic reconstructions of them in the 19th century.

But there are many eras of geologic time and restless evolutional experimentation in nature’s vast fossil scrapbook, from long before the dinosaurs as well as the epochs between their demise and our short time on the stage.

William Stout, a multi-talented artist who I have written about previously, has created murals of several periods of prehistoric life for The Houston Museum of Natural Science, Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, and the San Diego Natural History Museum (see my previous post on William Stout’s murals for the San Diego Natural History Museum).

Flesk Publications, a terrific independent art book publisher that I have also written about before, has published a lavish, beautifully designed and printed book devoted to displaying all of Stout’s prehistoric life murals.

The book is 144 pages in nicely large horizontal coffee-table format (10×12″, 25×30cm), crafted with with Flesk’s usual meticulous attention to quality and detail, and features reproductions not only from the finished murals, but from the preliminary half-size paintings submitted to the museum paleontologists for approval before the final paintings ere undertaken, as well as the sketches on which they were based and even some of the briefly notated thumbnail sketches that preceded those.

In fact, as much as I admire Stout’s final mural art, which displays a painterly approach rarely found in scientific murals, it is often his beautiful pen, ink and watercolor drawings that I find most appealing.

As I mentioned at the outset, there are wonderfully strange animals from many periods of life on Earth represented here, from the time before the dinosaurs up to our own ancestors, arrayed in dramatic scenes teeming with life and alive with color.

The book attempts to show not only the range of the mural subjects, but the range of artistic approaches Stout applied to the various tasks involved in the process of creating the murals. There is a pleasing variety to the formal and informal pencil drawings, ink sketches, watercolor renderings and finished oil paintings within the overall continuity of Stout’s recognizable style.

The Flesk Publications page devoted to the book unfortunately only shows a couple of images from the book, so you don’t really get a feeling for that variety.

You can see some of the paintings for the San Diego Natural History Museum in high-resolution here, and you can see a brief look at one of the ink and watercolor drawings in the animation on the Museum’s Fossil Mysteries page (from which I extracted the low-resolution image above, top), but there is no other web preview I can find to show you the character of the pencil, pen and watercolor renderings.

William Stout: Prehistoric Life Murals is available through the usual book channels, but can also be ordered directly from the Flesk Publications site in either a regular hardcover edition ($39.95), or a limited signed edition ($49.95).

I’ve wanted to do a post on Rudolph Zallinger for some time, but I keep putting it off in the hope that more of his work will be posted on the web. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be happening. I may still be able to make some people who aren’t already familiar with him aware of his work, even if I can’t show you a great deal of it.

Zallinger was one of the pioneers of of paleontological art, perhaps second only to Charles R. Knight in that respect. Zallinger is best known for his stunning 110×16′ (33.5×4.9m) mural, The Age of Reptiles, that covers the entire east wall of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Great Hall (watermarked poster version here).

The mural depicts the evolution of life on earth over 300 million years, with different sections, separated by the visual device of foreground trees, for geologic periods. It was painted with egg tempera in the fresco secco method; meaning “dry plaster”, as opposed to the more familiar traditional method of painting with into wet plaster (buon fresco) as practiced by Michelangelo for his frescos in the Sistine Chapel.

Rudolph Franz Zallinger was born in Irkutsk, Siberia to Austrian and Polish parents. They eventually emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Seattle where Rudolph was raised. His early interest in art was encouraged; and at age 17 he started study at Yale University’s School of Fine Arts on a merit scholarship as a painting major, and was also trained in illustration. He taught at the school after graduating.

He also started dong some scientific illustration and his talents were noticed by the director of the Yale Peabody Museum, who approached him about the possibility of doing a mural on the museum’s east wall.

Zallinger undertook a six month crash course in prehistoric plant and animal life and comparative anatomy with scientists from Yale and Harvard, and spent a year and a half creating preliminary studies and sketches before commencing work on the mural, which took three and a half years. The museum appointed him “artist in residence” a post he held for the remainder of his life.

Life magazine commissioned Zallenger for a series of illustrations and covers depicting prehistoric life, and his work also appeared in several books, notably The World We Live In, culled from the Life magazine articles, and The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles (which I still have my treasured copy of — look for it used, see a preview here).

One of his commissions for the magazine was later expanded into a new mural at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History as The Age of Mammals, depicting prehistoric mammals that, though they don’t get the same press, are every bit as wonderfully weird as the dinosaurs.

The past is always changing, particularly the distant past, as new information is brought to light. Knight’s active, leaping dinosaurs were replaced by Zallinger’s slow, gravity-bound behemoths, which were based on the prevailing scientific theories of the time. In them you’ll see the classic upright, tail dragging stance of tyrannosaurs, and elongated sauropods semi-submerded to support their weight, that were characteristic of mid-20th Century paleo art. It was Zallinger, in fact, who set the standards for that art, the artistic component of which has seldom, if ever, been matched.

Since then, the continued revision of our vision of the past has gone back to more lively dinosaurs with very different interpretations of anatomical reconstruction (which some modern paleo artists carry too far, indulging in fanciful depictions of 5 ton tyrannosaurs sprinting like leopards and brachiosaurs rearing on their hind legs in defiance of physics and bio mechanics).

The Yale Alumni Magazine commissioned contemporary artist Alan Male to create a virtual update of Zallinger’s mural, showing the animals in a more modern interpretation.

As anachronistic as they may seem in light of modern interpretations of dinosaurs, Zallinger’s inspired visions still have an uncommon visual power, unlike any paleontological artist before or since. They are now best appreciated as artworks, and powerfully evocative artworks. Zallinger studied traditional painting techniques and his paintings of dinosaurs look as though they are the interpretation of a Renaissance master, which I find just an amazingly great combination.

Reportedly Daniel Varney Thompson, the most authoritative translator of Cennino Cennini’s 15th-century classic The Art of Painting, on seeing The Age of Reptiles nearing completion, stated: “That wall is the most important since the 15th Century”.

Unfortunately, the Peabody Yale site is a bit confusingly organized; and, though it has information about the murals, including podcasts by contemporary scientists on the subject, and an article on the making of the mural by Zallinger himself; it is disappointing shy on images. They seem so desperately paranoid that someone will print a low-res version on a T-shirt or something, that they would apparently rather let Zallinger languish in obscurity than give the web audience a taste of how fantastic his work was.

Though I have never seen the actual murals (they’re high on my list whenever I get to Massachusetts), I have had the privilege of seeing a small (perhaps 12×50″) preparatory painting for the larger work.

I simply love the feeling in Zallinger’s work, his Renaissance flavored visions of steamy prehistoric jungles where hulking, leather skinned giants lashed at one another in slow motion fury under storm-darkened skies — wonderful stuff.

No, It’s not fireworks, at least not of the terrestrial variety.

(For the benefit of those in other parts of the world, I’ll point out that today, July 4th, is Independence Day here in the U.S., a holiday usually associated with fireworks displays.)

The fireworks shown here are celestial, in an interpretation of a supernova, the explosion of a large star that has collapsed in on itself when it can no longer sustain the fusion reaction necessary to hold its current form against the crush of its own gravity, in a painting by U.K. space artist and scientific illustrator Mark A. Garlick.

Garlick has a doctorate in astrophysics, giving him the scientific background to understand the phenomena he is portraying from the inside out. He has a site devoted specifically to his space art at space-art.co.uk, and another more general portfolio site in which he has galleries of earth sciences illustrations, paleo art, science fiction illustration and additional space art.

Garlick was working in traditional media, and some of the images are done in gouache, acrylic or pastel; but the majority of his recent work is done digitally, painted in Photoshop, sometimes with the addition of 3-D CGI in 3DS Max, Terragen or Bryce. He will also mix traditional and digital techniques.

Though he works in a variety of genres, it is his space art and earth science illustrations that I find most appealing. His bright color palette and sense of precise but lively realism give a feeling of immediacy that photography often doesn’t. Of course, one of the things space artists can do is show us views that telescopes and probes cannot. (See my post on pioneering space artist Chesley Bonestell.)

Garlck’s clients include Scientific American, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Scientist, The Guardian, Astronomy Magazine, Sky and Telescope and others. He is also a fellow in the International Association of Astronomical Artists, an organization devoted to promoting the genre.

Garlick is also the author of five popular books on astronomy.

Prior to the influence of pioneering paleontological artist Charles R. Knight, the display of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals in natural history museums consisted mostly of isolated fossilized bones in glass cases, fascinating to scientists to be sure, but perhaps as exciting to the general public as mounted butterfly specimens.

After Knight’s work with paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History to display the animals in realistic settings, and, later, Rudolf Zallenger’s astonishing murals for the Yale Peabody Museum, the display of prehistoric life by museums would never be the same.

These days, when natural history museums are competing with multimedia, games and popular entertainment to capture the attention of the public, the skeletons of prehistoric animals are mounted in the most dramatic and theatrical manner possible within the framework of scientific knowledge.

As museums renovate their dinosaur halls, which are often the focal point of a natural history museum’s public relations strategy, emphasis is placed on creating an immersive experience, a significant part of which is created by the presence of large murals depicting life in prehistoric settings (see my recent post on the spectacular new murals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Robert Walters and his studio).

A new exhibit at the San Diego Museum Natural History Museum called Fossil Mysteries that opened in the Fall features several dramatic new murals of prehistoric life by William Stout.

Stout is a multi-talented painter, paleo artist, concept designer, illustrator and comics artist who I profiled in 2006. The exhibit also includes work by Doug Henderson, Raúl Martin and others (artist bios here), but Stout’s paintings are the headliner.

His murals for the exhibit depict prehistoric life from several eras. From the age of giant mammals we see huge ground sloths, fierce sabertooth cats and giant mastodons. Reaching back into the dark mysteries of the Cretaceous Period and the Paleocene Epoch, Stout takes us into the depths of seas teeming with life. And, of course, there are dinosaurs; in this case a tableau of costal dinosaurs awash with brilliant color, dramatic skies and ingeniously theatrical lighting effects. All of them are vibrantly painted with Stout’s trademark emphasis on color, texture and fluidity of line.

Characteristic of the substandard quality of many natural history museum web sites, the SDNHM information on the murals is skimpy and not very informative. However, the museum has posted a wonderful set of high-resolution images of the murals, presumably for use by the press and schools (and, of course, lines and colors readers).

These are nice large files that are (finally!) big enough that you can really appreciate the way Stout has worked with his colors, values and contrasts to sharply define individual elements when viewed up close, but kept all of them working as part of a unified whole when seen from a farther vantage point. It’s also surprising how painterly the images can be when seen in detail.

Stout’s new murals will be featured in the March 2008 issue of Natural History magazine. You can also see some (unfortunately much smaller) images of Stout’s previous paleo life murals and other paintings of prehistoric life on his web site. His terrific book, The New Dinosaurs is still available and is full of his wonderfully expressive paintings and drawings of dinosaurs, often done in a playful nod to the styles of other artists (Art Nouveau dinosaurs anyone?).

Stout fans will also be delighted to know that Flesk Publications (which I mentioned most recently in my post about Steve Rude: Artist in Motion) is planning a volume of his work.

[Link via Paleoblog]

I’ve made the mistake in the past of putting off writing about an exhibition that I plan to go to in the hope of writing a first person account; and as a result wind up telling you about the show just as it’s about to close. I won’t do that this time.

National Geographic: The Art of Exploration, an exhibition of some of the amazing art collected by the magazine in its more than 100 year history, has already had a run at the Norman Rockwell Museum, where it originated and was curated. It is now a traveling exhibit and it opens at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania this Sunday, January 27, 2008, and runs through May 25.

National Geographic, a magazine noted for its stunning photography, also has a long history of hiring some of the nation’s best illustrators to portray what the camera cannot, whether peering into the mitochondria of a cell, reaching out into the depths of space, looking over the shoulders of participants in historic events or penetrating the mists of prehistory.

Some of the best examples of that art, over 100 works, have been selected from the thousands of pieces in the magazine’s archives and arranged in an exhibit that spans not only the history of National Geographic, but the history of civilization and history of the natural world; not to mention the history of 20th Century illustration.

The exhibit features work by artists like N.C Wyeth (above, top), Andrew Wyeth, Charles R. Knight, Tom Lovell (see yesterday’s post), Michael Parfit (above, middle left), Ned Seidler (above, bottom,left), Kinuko Y. Craft, John Gurche, John Sibbick, Jack Unruh, Jean-Leon Huens, Robert McCall, Pierre Mion, Paul Calle, Robert Addison, Vincent DiFate, Noel Siclkles, Burton Silverman, Thornton Oakley and many others. Some are pieces commissioned by the magazine and others are simply drawn from the magazine’s extensive collection.

Among the artists represented is James Gurney, the author/artist of the beautifully illustrated Dinotopia series (see my posts about Gurney here, here and here), who will be making a personal appearance at the Allentown Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibit on March 9 from 12-4pm.

Gurney has several pieces in the exhibition, including the dramatic portrayal of the Argentinian dinosaur Giganotosaurus shown above, bottom right, which accompanied the article Uncovering Patagonia’s Lost World for the December 1997 issue of the magazine.

Gurney is featuring a piece about the making of this painting today on his always-fascinating art blog Gurney Journey.

The Allentown Art Museum is at 31 North 5th Street in Allentown, PA. Allentown is about 35 miles Northwest of Philadelphia, and less than an hours drive from there via the PA Turnpike extension. Here is an article from the local paper about the show: Magazine’s images a feast for curious eyes, and another with a list of related events.

Also see Irene Gallo’s post on The Art Department.

Scientific illustration is sometimes thought of as mundane, but there is an area where it crosses over into subject matter that is more dramatic, bizarre and wild than the most fevered dreams of Surrealist painters, fantasy illustrators or movie concept artists, namely paleo art.

Dinosaurs can capture our imagination like few other aspects of the natural world. Ranging in size from tiny to gargantuan, with an astonishing variety of body shapes, plating, armor, horns, claws and almost unimaginable lengths of neck and tail, these glorious monsters are the dragons of our imaginations, except that they’re real.

When working in an area where reality frequently outdoes imagination, but everything is essentially a matter of educated guesswork, it’s sometimes difficult for artists to walk the line between trying to create accurate representations of these long-gone animals and trying to convey the sense of amazement they can spark in us.

Some paleo artists will let their desire for drama get away from them, and portray improbable scenes like 7 ton tyrannosaurs sprinting like cheetahs or 35 ton brachiosaurs rearing on their hind legs like giant elephants, ideas that stretch the limits of biology, physics and animal anatomy. One of the current fads is to represent all manner of dinosaurs as feathered, whether there is any direct evidence for feathering in that species or not.

The best reconstructions of long extinct species are just that, rigorous scientific reconstructions based on the physical data of fossilized bone, animal trackways and other evidence in the fossil record, combined with a thorough working knowledge of existing animal anatomy (plus a little physics, which might give a clue about how unlikely the above scenarios are). One of the problems here is that even trained paleontologists themselves are seldom anatomists, their training is in the study of fossils, but not necessarily in the physical anatomy of animals.

One of the major paleo artists that museums, publishers and paleontologists call on when they are most concerned with anatomical accuracy, combined with the artistic skills to make the animals and their environment as exciting and realistic as possible is Robert F. Walters.

Walters combines a keen understanding of animal anatomy, paleontology and natural history with an academic training as an artist. That, plus a flair for displaying scientifically accurate animal reconstructions in dramatic compositions, gives him a superb ability to portray prehistoric life in murals, illustrations and museum displays.

Walters’ background, interestingly enough, included an early career as a widely known science fiction artist. His covers and interior illustrations graced numerous science fiction books and magazines in the 70’s and 80’s. He was noted for his revival of the painstaking pen and ink stipple techniques employed by Virgil Finlay, as well as techniques that came out of his admiration for Joseph Clement Coll, Franklin Booth and other great pen and ink artists.

Fans of cyberpunk will recognize Walters as the cover artist for the original edition of True Names, the 1981 novella by Vernor Vinge that is generally acknowledged to be the first major work in that genre.

Walters’ fondness for golden age illustration carried over into his work as a paleo artist, with herds of dinosaurs roaming through landscapes ablaze with with Maxfield Parrish inspired colors.

Walters eventually curtailed his other work in favor of concentrating on dinosaurs as a paleontological life reconstruction artist. Along with his wife, Tess Kissinger, who is also a paleo artist and the author of an industry standard guide to copyright and contracts for dinosaur artists, he now heads a studio of paleontological artists and sculptors under the name of Walters & Kissinger.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Bob since high school, where we found we had a mutual interest in science fiction, comics, Dada and Surrealism, as well as Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and the other great illustrators in the Delaware Art Museum and, of course, dinosaurs. We both also went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, though at slightly different times.

Walters’ clients as a paleontological artist include The Smithsonian, The American Museum of Natural History, The Academy of Natural Sciences, Universal Studios, The National Aquarium, The Royal Tyrell Museum, The Discovery Channel and a long list of other notable museums, publishers and entertainment production companies.

Walters & Kissinger’s latest project has been their participation in the new installation and complete renovation of the dinosaur exhibits at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, for which they have just finished the world’s largest dinosaur mural.

The mural is 15 feet high and 179 feet long (4.5m x 54m), wrapping around two walls of the gallery, a scale which allowed the portrayal of both giant dinosaurs and tiny mammals. The studio also created 100 illustrations and two additional murals for the exhibit. (You can read a news release here.) The mural was just awarded the prestigious Lanzendorf prize for 2-dimensional art by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists.

Like most modern large scale murals, this one was painted digitally and transferred to the walls by photomechanical process. Walters was one of the first paleontological artists to make the transition to digital painting. He paints with a Wacom tablet in Photoshop; in the case of large scale murals like this, producing enormous high-resolution files that tax the capabilities of high-end desktop computers. The image above, showing Diplodocus carnegii in all his 90 foot glory, is a crop from one section of the Carnegie mural. I’ve indicated the position of the crop on a representation of the whole mural at bottom.

You can see the entire mural as a scrolling animation on the home page of the Walters & Kissinger web site at dinoart.com. You can also see more detailed images from the mural here, and in a slide show on this page. There is also a gallery of older work on the site. Unfortunately the images there are much smaller. Even in larger images on the web, it can be difficult to get an appreciation for the details in texture, shading and color that go into his paintings.

If you have the chance, of course, the best way to see Walters’ striking paintings of prehistoric animals is to see something like the world’s largest dinosaur mural in person. If you’re not in Pittsburgh, check with the natural history museum near you; he has done work for a large number of museums around the U.S. and internationally.

Walters has also illustrated and painted covers for numerous dinosaur books, including the Jurassic Park Institute Dinosaur Field Guide, The Complete Dinosaur and the Big Book of Dinosaurs (which, at the surprising price of $10 for a large scale full-color book of dinosaur art, is probably one of the best introductions to his work).