The University of Pittsburgh, which owns a rare complete edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, has digitized and made available online high resolution reproductions of the over 400 plates.

Birds of America was the culmination of Audubon’s quest to paint every known bird in North America. Though he fell short of that goal due to reaching the limits of his personal finances, he painted 435 beautifully detailed paintings, from which he created a most remarkable book.

Engravings made from his paintings were the basis for the plates, and the final pages were hand colored by assistants using Audubon’s paintings as a guide.

Audubon insisted that the birds be represented life-size, and the edition was printed on the largest mold made paper available at the time, known as “double elephant folio” size (26 x 38 inches, 66 x 96 cm). This is also why many of the larger birds are portrayed in somewhat contorted positions to fit the limits of the page, and why many of the smaller species are are shown in tableaux that fill the large spaces with multiple animals and surrounding environment.

The University of Pittsburgh’s online resource for Birds of America includes a history of the book and the digitizing project. They have also digitized his related text, Ornithological Biography and its accompanying plates as well.

The plates for Birds of America can be browsed by name or by thumbnail. You can choose thumbnail browsing options at the upper right.

The plates themselves come up in a viewing box that allows you to zoom way in on the detailed, high resolution images. What’s not obvious, and is key to enjoying the high res images, is that the zoom box has small adjustment grippers on the right and bottom edges that allow you to open the zooming window as large as your monitor will allow. In addition to the plus and minus controls, there is a triangular slider above them that allows for finer control of the zooming. Click and drag to pan.

Many of Audubon’s images involve more complex compositions and more visual drama than you might expect, particularly in cases where he has illustrated their relationship to natural predators or prey.

The details are also eye-opening. The anatomical details of talons and legs in particular will be notable for those interested in paleo art, and the backgrounds are surprisingly rich and varied, interesting in themselves as artworks.

Audubon, though he was creating a scientific treatise, was concerned with the book as a work of art. The plates were arranged for the esthetic impact on the reader rather than then being presented according to taxonomy, for which he was criticized by scientists at the time.

I don’t think that Audubon had to worry too much about his critics. After his remarkable achievement, and its enthusiastic reception worldwide, he could just flip them the bird.

[Via MetaFilter]

Presented as an adventurer’s sketchbook, which the author has “found”, the story resonates with some of the sense of wonder and discovery to be found in classic 19th Century adventure stories.

The original edition has been out of print for some time. Dover books has released a new 20th Anniversary edition, with images digitally scanned from the original transparencies and 32 new pages of material, including sketches, photos and unused plates and a discussion by Gurney of the creation of the original book.

Those in the U.S. can order signed copies directly from the author.

Here is Gurney’s post about the new edition on his blog, Gurney Journey.

I’ve been looking forward to the release of William Stout: Inspirations from Flesk publications since it’s companion volume, William Stout: Halllucinations, was released back in July (my review here).

Stout has been prolific in his career, and there are a number of illustrations and other drawings that are difficult to find in print. Much to the delight of Stout fans like myself, the two books have collected a number of these from various sources and presented them in the kind of beautifully produced and printed art volumes that are Flesk’s specialty.

The two collections are arranged thematically, the first focusing on monsters, trolls, dragons and creatures, the new one on women from fantasy and fairy tales.

In both volumes we see Stout having fun, gleefully drawing on his inspirations from traditional stories and pop culture as well as paying tribute to some of his artistic roots.

In Inspirations, we find Stout working with subjects from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare, The Wizard of Oz (Baum’s not MGM’s), Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Rima the Jungle Girl, The Bride of Frankenstein and even a humorous take on his own dinosaur illustrations; in the process creating playful homages to late 20th Century artists like Frank Frazetta and Dave Stevens, and Golden Age masters like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and the great but under-appreciated Gustav Tenngren and John Bauer (links to my posts).

In fact, in his Foreward, Stout outlines what he calls his “Rackham/Dulac Technique” in a step-by step walkthough of the process that many illustrators will find enlightening.

Stout has been influenced by a number of great Golden Age pen and ink illustrators, with a variety of approaches, and in his own style he has managed to distill a balance of linework, rendering and application of color that I find particularly appealing. Combined with his accomplished draftsmanship and fervent imagination, he serves up a smorgasbord of visual treats in these collections.

There is a small gallery of preview images on the Flesk site (click on the image to pop up the gallery), along with more detail about Inspirations and the companion volume Hallucinations, as well as the other Stout titles from Flesk: Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The titles can all be ordered directly from the Flesk online store (or the old way via mail).

The limited edition signed hardback version of William Stout: Inspirations is already sold out from the Flesk site, though you may still be able to order copies of the hardback directly from William Stout’s site.

You can also find more of Stout’s work, in a variety of media, subjects and approaches, in the galleries on his site.

In gallery art, artists who wish to survive on the sale of their art must produce work that finds an appreciative audience of buyers, and must often please gallery owners first in order to receive exposure.

Illustration has a special limitation in that the work must accompany and help express the themes, scenes or intention of a literary work, and must please editors as well as the public.

Scientific illustration brings with it the often stringent restriction that, in addition many of the challenges inherent in creating representational art, the work must adhere to scientific accuracy. This includes fields like botanical illustration, medical illustration, and that most popularly recognized branch of scientific art, paleontological illustration.

Paleo art carries even more restrictions, in that the artists are attempting to create realistic and scientifically accurate reconstructions of animals that no one has ever seen.

The importance of scientific accuracy in paleo art has led to a the creation of a special prize, awarded by the scientists themselves, for “outstanding achievement in paleontological scientific illustration and naturalistic art”. Named after, and partly supported by, noted paleo art collector John J. Lanzendorf, the Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize is awarded each year in October by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The 2-Dimensional Art category of the Lanzendorf Prize was most recently awarded to the “Hell Creek” mural at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Created by Robert F. Walters, who I previously profiled here, and his partner, Tess Kissinger, with help from artist Laura Fields, the 92 ft long and 15 ft high (28 x 4.5 metre) mural depicts a scene from the end of the Cretaceous Period, just before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. It is named for the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota, where fossils of many of the species portrayed have been found.

You can read an article, Hell Creek Mural Wins Lanzendorf Prize, on Discovery News, and see the accompanying large image of the entire mural here.

You can also see images from the mural on the Walters & Kissinger DinoArt.com website.

Walters and Kissinger head one of the worlds premier dinosaur art studios, as well as the more broad-based Walters & Kissinger Museum Illustration Studio. The prize comes just two years after they were awarded the 2007 Lanzendorf prize for the Morrison Foundation mural that is part of the same exhibit, and is also, at 180 ft x 15 ft (54 x 4.5 metres) the largest dinosaur mural in the world.

I’ve known Walters and Kissinger for a number of years, so I was privy to some of the additional challenges presented by the scale and scope of the mural in much more detail than usual.

Installed in the newly redesigned Dinosaurs in their Time installation of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the mural was required to incorporate a number of species of animals and prehistoric plants that existed at the time in a single panoramic scene (paleo artists, in addition to the portrayal of prehistoric animals, often must serve as botanical artists as well).

The mural also had to work within the physical structure of the museum building and the layout of the exhibit design. Also, in a way perhaps analogous to the Renaissance artists who had to answer to the Church in terms of the specific and minute details of how a scene was to be portrayed, modern paleo artists answer to the rigorous analysis of the scientists who study the animals and plants to be portrayed.

The specifications of the Hell Creek mural, as outlined by the scientists working on the project, required not only specific plants and animals, but required that the animals reflect the skeleton mountings in the museum’s collection. In many cases these skeletons are mounted directly in front of the section of the mural showing that animal, and the painting must accommodate the skeleton, as well as physical models of plants, as though they were extensions of the mural, working together to create an illusionistic space for the visitor (image above, bottom).

In addition, the mural incorporates the latest scientific findings in terms of the probable physical appearance of the animals, something that is constantly changing as new discoveries are made. The triceratops (the familiar three-horned dinosaurs that are the stars of the mural) incorporate a skin texture interpreted from a fossil impression of triceratops skin discovered less than a year before. Likewise the oviraptorosaur, the animal with a beak and bony crest on it’s head in the middle image, incorporates feathers from research on an earlier oviraptorosaur find in China.

So in addition to working within the restrictions of scientific accuracy, paleo artists must also play detective, piecing together bits of knowledge from scattered sources to recreate the best possible vision of the animal.

The artists were able to incorporate some elements to surprise and delight, as well. Almost hidden in the foliage away from the more dramatic animals, are smaller creatures, like the avisaurus, a primitive bird with teeth that flies through the forest canopy just above and to the right of the triceratops, and the didelphodon, a badger-sized marsupial mammal moving through the underbrush, almost unnoticed at the right of the triceratops’ feet.

The late Cretaceous Period was a time when flowering plants came to prominence, and Walters told me that he took special delight in the portrayal of the group of edmontosaurs (the “duck-billed” dinosaurs to the left of the triceratops) in a field of flowers that resembled modern buttercups. Much of the other flora displayed is also recognizable as familiar modern plants that began to appear in that period.

Paleo artists have help, of course, in the reconstruction of extinct animals, working with the paleontologists who discover and study them, but even that has its limitations. The definition of paleontologist is one who studies ancient life, but not all paleontologists are anatomists, knowledgeable about the skeletal and muscular functioning of modern animals.

Having studied human anatomy in sessions at the medical college of Thomas Jefferson University while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Walters places a great deal of emphasis on accurate animal anatomy in his paleontological life reconstruction art.

The challenge, of course, was to take all of these considerations, scientific restrictions and requirements and mold them into a dynamic composition that immerses us in another time, in the orange glow of a sunset that presages the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

So when artists think they are working within too many restrictions, they might consider the additional challenges in artistic fields where science is the salon jury.

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.

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.

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).

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.