Presenting: Dinosaur Art

Posted on 10/08/2012 by luisvrey

I’m making public this picture in celebration of having participated in a new Steve White project due out very soon. It is entitled Dinosaur Art, The World’s Greatest Paleoart (due to be released the 28th of September)and  compiles some of the all-time greatest paleoartists (to whom I’m honoured to accompany in this volume… looking at them reminds me how much more there is still to learn!). This picture you see here (due also to be released in the next R. Bakker/ L.V.Rey “big” project) pretends to be a tribute to 160 years of evolution in the Dinosaur Image. Yes, from Waterhouse Hawkin’s old bear-like Megalosaurus in Crystal Palace to that lean, mixed-bag theropod we still call Megalosaurus today… quite a dramatic change!

This selection is just a sample from all the art included in Dinosaur Art, a hardback, lavishly presented  and historically backed volume  There are extensive art sections dedicated to Julius Csotony, Greg Paul, Mauricio Antón, Douglas Henderson, John Conway, Raúl Martín, John Sibbick, Robert Nicholls and Todd Marshall. With foreword by Phil Currie, introduction by Scott Sampson and scientific consultancy by Darren Naish, this book is a must for any collector. It also backs-up one of my main arguments for dinosaur illustration… we strive in variety! Quite a few styles are represented here and (for me) the more the merrier… and I’m happy to state: every artist in this v0lume has done his scientific homework thoroughly!

Everything has been organised by Steve White, himself an illustrator and dinosaur lover since time immemorial (he gave me my second formal job as paleoartist in a Marvel Dinosaur dinosaur comic compilation around 1990!).

Towards the 21st of September I’ll be signing copies with some of my fellow travellers (including probably Darren Naish) at the Natural History Museum and possibly the Forbidden Planet store in Shaftesbury  Ave in London. All dates are now confirmed  (see http://forbiddenplanet.com/events/2012/09/22/dinosaurs-london/)

 I hope to see some of you there.

You can pre-order the book here:

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Yutyrannus. This is how things really change…

Posted on 30/07/2012 by luisvrey

As I have been stressing in my recent talks in Aarhus, Bristol and London the Image of the Dinosaur in modern times keeps changing at an alarming speed rate that many times threatens a good chunk of our work to become obsolete in a very short time. No time for the creation of Icons. Never mind, we have the tools to modify things now, and we should not be afraid to use them and above all, we should not be afraid of change… Science Fiction in this case is not arbitrary or mere fantasy; it can and must  abide by the evidence. Palaeontology has become an ever-increasing dynamic science. Paradoxically, the more evidence we gather the more avenues to the imagination are opened. I have been saving the surprises of new illustrations for the time when my new “big”(really big!) book with Dr. Bakker comes to light next year, but  in the meantime, here’s an advance preview: Yutyrannus, the feathered tyrannosaur.

You might think: well, many people (including me) have been restoring small or baby tyrannosaurs with feathers since the late nineties (or even before)… but this time we have the evidence in stone of a sizeable, albeit primitive tyrannosaur and worst of all: it opened the possibility that  adult T. rexes  might have been somewhat feathered too… a notion that I had always been reluctant to illustrate… Is this once again pushing serious dinosaur illustrators into the realm of “Science Fiction”  like the notion of feathered dinosaurs did to so many many years ago? Well… here’s your answer. Now that we have Yutyrannus, things will never be the same from now on. It may well be that T. rex was not fully feathered;  after all we have patches of T. rex skin that look “pebbly” (in the words of Bakker himself) and it might be that we find a complete T. rex with no feathers… but in the meantime we don’t know where those patches of skin come from… and then we have Yutyrannus!

T. rex feathered… are we joking? A feathered carnivore monster the size of a house? Watch this space in the future!

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Bringing it down (Having fun with Allosaurus Part 2)…

Posted on 26/07/2012 by luisvrey

This piece is taken from “Dinosaurs In The Round” too. Hunting pack of allosaurs try to bring down a medium sized sauropod (Camarasaurus). This scene is inspired by a sculpture group scene I saw in an  “exhibition” made in the gardens around the Rocca dei Rettori in Benevento (that we visited with our friends Marco Signore and Luciano Campanelli while I was invited to do a talk and exhibition for a Palaeontological event in Benevento).  The park was a bit abandoned, but it was nevertheless beautiful and the anatomy of the dinosaurs sculptures was fairly accurate.

It is also predominantly inspired by the way lions bring down buffalo or even elephants… pack hunting at the highest level!

However,  I doubt very much that Allosaurus could do anything with Brachiosaurus… except perhaps attack babies or scavenge a leg or two (these two are from “Dino Babies”…. see it in 3D in the new “Dinosaurs In Your Face” compilation).

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Oldies from Dinosaurs In The Round… From 3D to 2D.

Posted on 20/07/2012 by luisvrey

Here’s the Cretaceous diorama from Dinosaurs In The Round . When you have to do a cardboard cut-out 3D piece, the computer layering system is quite valuable . Here I tried to put together all the layers as they would have been seen  in flattened 2D horizontal position (and that is not counting the enormous amount of layers I had already used in the creation of every figure)… obviously I planned the maquette  layer upon layer starting with  Triceratops  at the front (T. rex next and Edmontosaurus in the far back).

Same with the other two dioramas:

Jurassic (with Pterodactylus, Diplodocus, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus hidden in the forest and a Camarasaurus and Brachiosaurus herd in the far background)

… and Triassic, with Eudimorphodon, Coelophysis, Rutiodon, Placerias and Postosuchus in the background)

… the water here is supposed to be translated in a plastic sheet…  the team at Quarto Publishing did a really good job in the presentation of the package. All in all good volcanic vintage fun!

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Having Fun with Hadrosaurs… a few sketches.

Posted on 16/07/2012 by luisvrey

For anyone with a  taste for creativity and colour, Hadrosaurs -like this strangely crested Olorotitan- simply open the gates for a flood of possibilities. I could finally see a mounted Olorotitan specimen in the Natural History Museum in Brussels (the best dinosaur museum in Europe). It is a lightly-build animal, probably lighter than I depicted it here. But the crest of hadrosaurs is always a challenge to reconstruct (specifically the external appearance and the possibility of external attachments to it). Put that together with the rich skin topography and frill ornaments and you get as many possibilities as imagination allows you. Please note that I have reserved bright colours to display items like crests and frills… although rich skin colour patterns could have been anywhere, given the differences in shapes and size of the scales. The question of colours is… did big dinosaurs have colour vision or not? I contend that they had.I can spend many hours sketching (as this illustration from “Dinosaurs, The Most Complete, Up-To Date Encyclopedia” by Holtz/Rey shows). But the non crested ones are just as fascinating. The construction of the nostrils are a special challenge and the neck musculature is still being debated between the later most favoured “Bison” model and the slender, flexible neck.

This is a  Mexican Gryposaurus…And this one another version of Edmontosaurus…

All these are older illustrations that led to the Maisaura I included in the mural and specially the “Orchestra attack”  by Parasaurolophus from a previous post (which also tried to address the problem: how these animals would defend themselves agains the tyrannosaurs and other predators?). But I think they are  experiments worth showing. Here’s an old Maisaura tending the nest (from “Dinosaurs In The Round”).

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David Hone’s Darwinopterus

Posted on 12/07/2012 by luisvrey

Last time he was around here, David Hone inspired me to do this restoration of Darwinopterus, and I have done it to his specifications (it is in the act of landing on the tree). Based on beautifully preserved material,  the combination of characters is quite unusual, like a Rhamphorhynchus and a Pterodactylus fused in one… yet another perfect evolutionary transitional form! For more details see this article in Tetrapod Zoology: http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/10/14/darwinopterus-transitional/

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The Murals for Hatching The Past.

Posted on 06/07/2012 by luisvrey

This expanded  and modified version of my nesting oviraptors (Citipati) facing the storms in Mongolia is part of the trilogy I have devised for the ambitious itinerant exhibition Hatching The Past that has been organised by my friends the Magovern family from Stone Company. Picture this one at 3 meters high by around seven or eight long.

The second mural is this: another modified version of a familiar scene of the Saltasaurus  nesting grounds from South America. It is similar in sized and both are  backgrounds for parts of the exhibition that will serve as children playground areas.

In case the exhibition comes anywhere near you, don’t miss it… it’s worth visiting! You get a lot more than just fun and murals, there are casts in abundance, it is well researched and informative and you will see real fossil nests. For more information contact  the Stone Company website.

I have just received this information directly from them:

“Hatching the Past is the overall exhibit name and Dinosaur Eggs and Babies is the most used subtitle.  Hatching did not translate well into Spanish so our Monterrey, México exhibit is Dinosaurios, huevos y bebes; Encuentro con el pasado. This exhibit is the only one currently running and will close September 23rd.
Our next opening is in Eastern Tennessee on September 15th.  We hope to be adding the prototype play area with full size oviraptor background to this venue.   The grand opening of the full play area and dinosaur nursery is planned for March 1st, 2013 in Amarillo, Texas.”

The third mural I did for them is a lot more ambitious… you may have noticed the picture that is at the header of this Blog. Well, now imagine it life size! Yes the final results became a piece that is around three meters tall by seventeen meters long with the big dinosaurs motherly looking over you and your own offspring… the mighty computer files had to be retouched to the last detail. All the dinosaurs were done in the same new style that will be prominently showcased in the next Bakker/Rey, Random House project due out very soon.

Here are a couple of isolated examples: no exhibition about dinosaur eggs and babies would be complete without Maiasaura…

And a late-minute rendition of Triceratops.

You may also have noticed that I incorporated some new information regarding the skin topography of Triceratops… the recent discovery of extensive fossilised imprints of Triceratops skin also teach us how little do we know about the external appearance of these incredible beasts… the scales around the neck of Triceratops are big and square and with that mosaic of spikes it may have looked  like a shielded, beaked,  horned , oversized hedgehog!

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The Oviraptor Saga.

Posted on 05/07/2012 by luisvrey

If there’s an  animal that perfectly suits the creativity of any dinosaur illustrator it is the enormous array of oviraptorosaur species. Here I used several well known species (known from well described fossil specimens) as well as several  as yet to be described, unnamed species (I’ve got hold of beautiful casts of those). They range from the big American caenagnathid to the small, crestless Conchoraptor. Most oviraptorids have been collected in Mongolia, and the most popular of them are Citipati and  Khaan… that have been found associated with nests and eggs. You can see the nesting saga of Citipati at my website at http://www.luisrey.ndtilda.co.uk

Of course, things got well out of hand when the T. rex sized Gigantoraptor was discovered in Mongolia!

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Therizinosaurus.

Posted on 04/07/2012 by luisvrey

I did  Therizinosaurus  in this zebra-stripped guise right from the first painting I did of it. Then, Dorling Kindersley -under my supervision- took the idea to 3D levels in the the DK “Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life”, a book that Darren Naish and I have special memories of .  I like to keep some consistency in the depiction of “my” animals… in a new version to be published soon, I have extended the feathery coverage… it is indeed a strange animal. I have a cast of one of its claws and with the keratin cover, it would have been measured a metre or more. I also have a cast of a therizinosaur nest…  This is a sketch reconstructing  what was inside one of the eggs in exactly the same posture. This therizinosaur was not Therizinosaurus itself, but it gives a good idea of what might have been a real Therizinosaurus embryo.

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The inseparable Chinese Couple…

Posted on 03/07/2012 by luisvrey


Guanlong… A rare, feathered and crested tyrannosaur and the other,  Yinlong a (basal ceratopsian) enact here what their possible descendants (Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops would  continue to do millions of years later). I employed a completely different style in this one…  but the approach continues to be the same (first published in “Dinosaurs, The Most complete…” encyclopaedia by Thom Holtz and  Luis V. Rey).

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