The “About Me” section of Dan McCarthy’s web site simply has three photos of him pulling screen prints, a photo of a dog (presumably his), and the unhelpful legend, “more soonish..”.

Not very informative, but the prints are pretty much the story. Though there are sections of posters, paintings and even T-shirts on the site, they all seem to carry the flavor of his prints.

The prints themselves are very graphic, beautifully designed and often carry themes of trees against the night sky and, a subject I’m always keen on, dinosaurs, particularly as portrayed in the form of their skeletal remains. The one above, for example, is a 4 color screen print on 100lb Stonehenge printmaking paper (a wonderfully textured paper that I like as a drawing paper for chalk and conté). Oddly, McCarthy doesn’t indicate the size of the edition on the pages that describe the individual prints, but some of them are listed a sold out, so I presume the runs are reasonable numbers (I don’t know the limits of current screen printing materials).

Check out this fascinating print (unfortunately sold out) that is essentially a short graphic story, the biography of a carbon atom.

His posters share some of the same themes, notably skeletal winter trees and skeletal paleo images. Even his paintings are very graphic and share the same thematic direction.

His drawings are a bit different, but I’m particularly fond of them. They remind me very much of drawings I used to make when I was younger, of telephone wires, poles and transformers. (I was just fascinated with the idea of lines drawn across the sky.) Mine were just sketches, though. McCarthy’s are more fully realized silhouette drawings, carefully composed and strongly designed.

McCarthy’s “news” page does seem to have a recent update, and lists newly added prints, so maybe the “more soonish..” promise will be realized with more images and a bit of background about this fascinating artist. Until then we’ll have to extrapolate, like paleontologists, from the bones we can find.

Link via Paleoblog and Drawn!

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

For somebody who isn’t specifically a paleo artist, New Zealand artist Greg Broadmore paints very cool and realistic dinosaurs. He has apparently loved drawing dinos from an early age (as happens to many of us), and now gets to paint them in the service of movie concept art, specifically for the lavishly dinosaur-populated remake of King Kong from Peter Jackson.

Broadmore works as a concept artist for Jackson’s WETA Workshop and has also done concept design and illustration for The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the upcoming Halo and live action Evangelion films.

He works digitally in Photoshop and Painter, and his illustrations have a feeling of physical paint and a muscular approach to light and shade that gives his work an appealing immediacy and power.

Broadmore’s work is featured prominently in The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island, a book set up as a mock “natural history” of Kong’s Skull Island, beautifully illustrated by the WETA concept artists who worked on the film.

Broadmore also created a comic called Killer Robots Will Smash the World that is published in New Zealand and may bit hard to find here in the States (I’m looking).

Did I mention that he also paints great robots?

The links below are to his galleries on the WETA Workshop site, that showcase his concept art for the films, and a site called The Battery, a project he shares with fellow WETA artist Warren Mahy, which features some of his sketches and quick studies, as well as more finished personal work.

John Gurche is a paleontological artist known for the near-photographic realism and compositional drama in his scientific reconstructions of prehistoric life.

Gurche was a consultant on Jurassic Park and provided paintings for the 1989 dinosaur stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. His illustrations have been in numerous books and have been featured in magazines like National Geographic and Natural History Magazine. His work is in the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian and the Field Museum, which houses the mural version of the t-rex image above, showing an interpretation of the famous t-rex find named “Sue” which is mounted at the Field.

His dinosaur images in particular showcase his ability to add realism to scenes of prehistoric life with his superb control of atmospheric effects and aerial perspective. He also has a knack for finding unusual positions and angles of view for his images.

Although his work covers many aspects of prehistoric life, his is most widely recognized by the general public for his dinosaur art, and is probably best known in the scientific community for his reconstructions of early humans and pre-human species.

He is currently involved in an 10 year ongoing project called “Lost Anatomies” for which he is illustrating many of the anatomical changes that have occurred to the human form over the course of our evolutionary history.

Charles R. Knight was one of the most influential and well known paleontological artists in the history of the field, and was one of the pioneers of paleontological reconstruction art, creating images of extinct animals based on their fossil remains and a knowledge of modern animal anatomy.

He began his study of art at an early age, taking classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in spite of the fact that he had been struck in the eye with a stone at the age of six and suffered from an astigmatism that together rendered him legally blind.

He was from a family that had a passion for the outdoors and soon carried his interest in drawing to the zoo, beginning a lifetime practice of drawing animals. He started his career as an professional artist working for a firm that decorated churches and gradually moved into illustration for magazines and children’s books.

His interest in animals led him to the American Museum of natural History, where his frequent visits were noticed by the museum’s scientists, one of whom, Dr. Jacob Wortman, asked him if he could draw a reconstruction of prehistoric mammal that resembled modern pigs.

Knight used his knowledge of modern animal musculature and surface anatomy to create a successful restoration that began his career as a paleontological reconstruction artist.

Working at a time when most fossils at the AMNH were kept in drawers and there were no dinosaur skeletons in the kind of dramatic display that we now expect of natural history museums, Knight worked with Henry Farifield Osborn and William Matthew to create displays of the animals in lifelike mountings.

The scientific accuracy of his reconstructions was up-to-date with scientific findings at the time, but the past changes quickly. Paleontology has made dramatic advances in recent years and Knight’s images of tyrannosaurs and triceratops with their tails dragging on the ground and apatosaurs (at the time called brontosaurs) wading in water to support their bulk are inaccurate in light of modern knowledge.

The power of his artwork remains, however, and Knight’s drawings, watercolors, oil paintings and large scale murals are still considered classics in the field and are still influential on subsequent generations of paleo artists. Knight absorbed influences from the art world around him, including the brilliant colors of Impressionism and the elegant compositions of Japanese art and brought a feeling of light, texture and life to his work that set high standards for everyone who was to follow.

There is an excellent website devoted to Knight, maintained by his granddaughter Rhoda Knight Kalt that includes a detailed bio, gallery and Knight related news. The American Museum of Natural History has an excellent online gallery of Knight’s work, even if the images are small.

Knight was featured as a character in the IMAX film T-rex: Back to the Cretaceous, and the historical graphic novel Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards (more info here).

A previously unreleased autobiography, Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist (more info here), has been published, put together by an interesting team, including a forward by Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, an introduction by William Stout and illustrations by Mark Schultz (see my previous posts on William Stout and Mark Schultz). Stout, who is himself a dinosaur artist of note, has published three volumes of Charles R. Knight Sketchbooks (toward the bottom of that page).

In addition to his ground breaking and influential work as a paleo artist, Knight also continued to pursue his interest in painting modern animals, particularly tigers and other big cats. In fact, Knight may have thought of himself as simply a nature artist, portraying animals and plants, both contemporary and extinct, with equal aplomb.

Michael Skrepnick gets to draw and paint fantastic animals that are as wild and bizarre as anything done by any fantasy or science fiction artist, except that the animals he portrays are real, or at least based on the best information we have about real animals that once walked the Earth.

Paleo artists like Skrepnick work with paleontologists to create images of animals long extinct by extrapolating their appearance from the fossil record and from a knowledge of modern animals that share physiological characteristics with the extinct ones. In the case of dinosaurs, this means birds and members of the crocodile family.

Good paleo artists and paleontologists are painstaking in their efforts to recreate these animals faithfully. The fossils give good information about skeletal structure, from which things like muscle mass, size and weight of an animal can be deduced. There is also some information about skin textures. (For color, however, fossils don’t give a clue.) The closer we get to the reality of what dinosaurs actually looked like, the more one thing becomes clear: these were some weird puppies.

Working in graphite or pen and ink for monochromatic works and in acrylic for paintings, Skrepnick portrays prehistoric animals with a clear, sharp and detailed style that reinforces their connection with the real world and recognizable environments and makes their strangeness even more palpable. His dinosaurs are bathed in sunlight, strongly modeled and connected to the ground and the world around them.

His images have appeared in many museums and scientific institutions and in books from a variety of publishers.

There are two galleries in the site, but the images are frustratingly small - not large enough to get a real feeling for the quality and drama of Skrepnick’s work. Try looking for some of the books he has illustrated.

Some titles are: Great Dinosaur Expeditions and Discoveries: Adventures With the Fossil Hunters (Dinosaur Library) (Thom Holmes, Laurie Holmes), Armored, Plated, and Bone-Headed Dinosaurs: The Ankylosaurs, Stegosaurs, and Pachycephalosaurs (The Dinosaur Library) (Thom Holmes, Laurie Holmes), Triceratops: Mighty Three-Horned Dinosaur (I Like Dinosaurs!) (Enslow Publishers), Sinosauropteryx-Mysterious Feathered Dinosaur (I Like Dinosaurs!) (Michael William Skrepnick), and Mesozoic Vertebrate Life: (Indiana University Press), for which the image of Monolophosaurus jiangi, shown here, is the cover.

I first encountered Bill Stout’s work in underground comix. He then cropped up on the covers of Firesign Theatre albums and in the pages of magazines devoted to automotive humor from Peterson Publishing (a publishing niche which also featured work from Gilbert Shelton and Alex Toth). By the time I found his remarkable book of dinosaur art, The Dinosaurs, I was a solid Stout fan, and the book was a big influence on me when I started doing my series of dinosaur cartoons for Asimov’s.

Stout worked with Russ Manning on the Tarzan daily newspaper strips and worked with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny. In addition to comics, album cover art and dinosaur art, Stout has done fantasy art, trading cards, movie poster art, and film design. The one common thread is that his work always stands out.

His admiration for the classic pen and ink illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll, paleo art greats like Charles R. Knight and classic comics artists like Wally Wood, Will Elder and Al Williamson serves him well. Stout has a wonderful ability to put down just the right amount of hatching, just the right spotted blacks and just the right amount of detail to make his drawings hit my visual pleasure button square on. Unfortunately there aren’t many examples of his black and white work on his site, but you can see some of it on the covers of his published Convention Sketches.

Stout’s beautiful book of dinosaur art has been reissued as The New Dinosaurs. Also in print is Abu and the 7 Marvels, illustrated by Stout and authored by Richard Matheson. There is an interview with Matheson and Stout on SciFi.com.

Delightfully, you can also get many of Stout’s convention sketchbooks as well as sketchbooks on other themes, reprints of classic stout comics, other books, trading cards and all manner of other Stout stuff directly from his site. Stout sometimes offers his original art for sale directly on the site or through eBay. He also keeps a journal on the site.

The images on his site are a bit small to get a real feeling for the quality of his work. There is an unofficial Stout gallery here with some larger images, and there are some interviews with him on the Comics Journal site.

Olduvai George is a blog title and online identity for natural history illustrator Carl Buell. (The name is a play on Olduvai Gorge, a large ravine in Tanzania where some of the earliest human remains have been found.)

Buell has a passionate fascination with animals, living and extinct, although his work has him most often illustrating animals that lived in the last 65 million years (after the disappearance of the dinosaurs). His robust, colorful illustration style uses texture and color relationships to give the animals a real sense of physical presence.

He works in both traditional media and digital painting, working primarily in Photoshop for the latter. You’ll also find work in acrylic posted on the site (image above). Here is his step-by-step walk through of his digital illustration of a mammoth, and a more abbreviated look at the drawings for a color image of a bird.

The links that say “Click here for a larger, more detailed image” link to Buell’s Photostream on Flickr. While it’s nice to be able to leaf through the images that way, and I think there are a few on Flickr not on the blog, the images are disappointingly not much (or any) bigger then the images on the blog. They’re good sized on the blog postings, I would just enjoy seeing more of the details because the images seem rich in detail and texture.

There are both color and black and white illustrations posted on the site. Some of the black and white ones are preparatory drawings for color pieces, some are finished (and nicely rendered) black and white illustrations.

Check out this wonderful black and white landscape, inspired in part by Ansel Adams’ photographic techniques.

Link via John Nack on Adobe and Drawn!.

Dinosaurs get all the attention in paleo art, and not surprisingly so. What else is so dramatic and visually arresting? But paleontological artists deal with many other aspects of recreating the appearance of prehistoric life.

There are numerous other prehistoric animals that preceded, followed or co-existed with the dinosaurs. (The main animal in the image above, rutidon lithodendrorum, is not a dinosaur but a phytosaur, a group of animals that shared a common ancestor with modern crocodiles.) In addition, most prehistoric animals that are recreated in scientific illustrations need to be portrayed in relationship to their environment. That requires a painstaking recreation of prehistoric landscapes and ancient plants.

On top of scientific accuracy and the challenge of representing the animals and plants in a way that makes their unique characteristics clear to the viewer, scientific and nature artists face the same challenges as other other artists: creating a successful composition, issues of draughtsmanship and rendering, controlling light and shade and blending the disparate elements into a unified whole.

Paleo artist Douglas Henderson is so good at this that I often think of his illustrations as beautifully rendered landscapes that happen to have prehistoric animals in them. I think Henderson himself must feel somewhat that way. He started out drawing landscapes and his scientific illustrations have compositions that emphasize putting the animals in relationship with their surroundings, often portraying them as relatively small in the landscape. This is actually a more realistic view than the artificial compositions that focus on the animals and feature a little bit of the environment as background.

Henderson does beautiful color work, but what I find particularly appealing are his black and white illustrations. There is no information about techniques on the site, (”The art of Paleo Illustration” section has been “under construction” for several years.), but I assume the black and white illustrations are done in charcoal because of their rich, deep blacks and soft gray tones. His compositions often feature silhouetted foreground elements, like tree trunks or fallen logs, as a framing device for the animals and primary landscape area, further emphasizing that the animals are in the landscape, not just in front of it. This approach also allows him to utilize a very broad range of tones in the drawings.

Henderson’s work appears in museums across the country and he has illustrated or contributed to numerous books on prehistoric life.

One of the most difficult challenges in paleontological illustration is making it naturalistic. That sounds like a contradiction. Dinosaur art is, after all, natural history illustration; but by naturalistic I mean that the animals need to look like they could really be alive. They need to stand and move like real animals.

It’s one thing to do that in paintings and drawings of modern animals, for which there are living examples and photographic reference; it’s quite another thing for animals that have been extinct for millions of years and must be painstakingly reconstructed from the evidence of fossilized bone and a knowledge of animal anatomy.

Paleo artist Mark Hallett has been doing it superbly for over 30 years. His giant sauropods look as though they should walk right past you, as if you should feel their footsteps vibrate the ground under your own feet. His Staurikosaurus and Compsognathus look as if they should dart out from the bushes as quickly as a bird.

Hallet’s work has been in major publications like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History and Life magazine. His paintings have been on view in museums in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan.

Hallett’s site doesn’t have nearly enough of his art for you to get a real feeling for the scope and richness of his work. Consider the site a taste and look for some of the books he’s illustrated, some on dinosaurs, like “Seismosaurus”, with writer David Gillette (image above), and some in the series on prehistoric mammals with writer Barbara Hehner: “Ice Age Sabertooth : The Most Ferocious Cat That Ever Lived” , “Ice Age Mammoth : Will This Ancient Giant Come Back to Life?” and “Ice Age Cave Bear : The Giant Beast That Terrified Ancient Humans”.