Sinusonasus Fighting.

Posted on 02/07/2012 by luisvrey

I have noticed that several key pieces in my own development as a dinosaur illustrator are absent from my website. The purpose of this blog is also to  refresh them.  I tried to represent these two Sinusonasus raptors as naturally and as realistic as possible. I used as  inspiration a couple of herons(*) fighting, although with those recurved talons of Sinusonasus, the fight would have been much more deadly… it is always a challenge to represent Raptors in a very different light without having to make them look excessively reptilian, a trend that I started a long time ago with paintings like  the sinornithosaur “Dave” (that is included in the website and I will show here with a little story in the next few days). I always worry that my raptors could look like coated lizards… Dave and Sinusonasus surely don’t. It is always important to keep looking at modern nature for inspiration, it keeps the dinosaur restorations fresh and alive.

*(correction)

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Raptorial family life.

Posted on 01/07/2012 by luisvrey

This piece from “Dino Babies”  was a modification of the purported original cover with added members of the family… it was originally going to be Velociraptor (as you can see for the colours), but at the end I finished it off as Deinonychus… and boisterous. virtually winged babies (reconstruction of the jumping baby is based on a real  3D skeleton)!

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Old Volcanic Stuff.

Posted on 30/06/2012 by luisvrey

Giganotosaurus extreme close-up as I envisioned for my first and only Pop-up book called “Dinosaurs In The Round”… I’m including the cover here too. It is a book that represented a challenge but it was so much fun to do!  Layer upon layer were translated into 3-D detailed dioramas for the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous. I will be posting more excerpts from that book in the next posts. The Triceratops and T. rex in the cover were loosely based on the L.A.  Natural History Museum old mount of the clash of the eternal rivals .

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Mammal Evolution

Posted on 29/06/2012 by luisvrey

The strange world of mammal evolution is present in these two pieces.  The dog-like cynodont therapsid Cynognathus and the utterly handsome dinocephalian (more like a side branch in evolutionary terms) Estemmenosuchus. Both have been published in Anusuya Chinsamy’s  “Forerunners Of Mammals” previously mentioned in another post. Although probably not as “attractive” as dinosaur evolution… the incipient mammal evolutionary stages are just as fascinating. 

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The Deinonychus Saga (Part 2)

Posted on 27/06/2012 by luisvrey

We were talking about female Deinonychus in the previous post… what about this dandy. flamboyant male? I did this as a challenge: we really don’t have much evidence of the exterior of dinosaurs… what is underneath all that flamboyancy  is what we strictly know about Deinonychus: it skeleton.  For the rest we have imagination and the best model we can get:  nature itself.

At the end we had to return to females at work… here’s another snapshot at the precise moment where one of them (Tenontosaurus or Deinonychus) is going to get killed. If you are wondering about the strange little scene in the background (Sauropelta being attacked by two Deinonychus) it is because originally this illustration was used in a book called “Dinosaur Magnets”… yes… those little figures were going to be magnets to be used anywhere in the background landscape! I think the main scene that serves as framework is a rather risque figure study.

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The Deinonychus Saga (Part 1)

Posted on 27/06/2012 by luisvrey

Since I’m going backwards and forwards with the artwork in this blog, I decided to include a bit of the Denonychus Saga that inspired the  3D restoration you can see  in previous pages. I have depicted the deadly embrace of Deinonychus and Tenontosaurus many times (you might be familiar with the two pieces I’m including here this time: the first one was first published in the Bakker/Rey “Dinosaurs” from Random House and the second one goes as back as that ancient collector’s item called “Extreme Dinosaurs!”).

The two illustrations depict females only (doing the hardest job as it is quite often in nature!). In the next post there will be yet another female… and a male, sitting pretty. Why I depicted them with bald heads and looking like condors or vultures… why not?

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Our daily dose of dino-weirdness…

Posted on 26/06/2012 by luisvrey

We are used to Nature’s jokes, but this one… well… this is the joke nobody expected in the mosaic of dino=bird evolution… could it be lemur-mimic dinosaur like Epidendrosaurus?  That is why I reconstructed it this way… fully covered with fluff, no feathers around the arm but FOUR enormous ribbon-like ones serving perhaps as  tail balance or for ornamental display perhaps? And then that weird oviraptor-therizinosaur-like skull with those enormous frontal teeth… tales of evolution at its tinkering best!

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Some mammal stuff from “Prehistoric Monsters”

Posted on 25/06/2012 by luisvrey

Denizens of the Ice Age and Platybelodon protecting its baby…. These two pieces that are part of the Prehistoric Monsters book I did with Dr. Bob Bakker some years ago and in turn they are now part of the newly released “Dinosaurs In Your Face“… it meant a departure from the dinosaur world I was submerged in, but at the same time, I relished the variety and the opportunity to get into other stuff. I hope you can see them better now (the paper they were printed on originally was not so good, so the quality suffered quite a lot).

It also meant a first trial of new techniques and a complete departure from my old style… among other things now I was able to “paint” with real skin, creating my own brushes. These effects will be shown at  greater length, now with more mature and diversified results in quite a few of the new projects I will be showing in this blog in the very near future.

By the way, the idea of Platybelodon cradling the baby in its lower jaw was Dr. Bob’s not mine!

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Announcing: “Dinosaurs In Your Face”

Posted on 24/06/2012 by luisvrey

Random House has just re-released several of my collaborations with Robert Bakker (“Dinosaurs!”, “Dino Babies!” and “Prehistoric Monsters!” … for the first time in 3D! Yes… more exclamation marks… they have compiled several of the children books we have done in one volume that includes 3D glasses and all!  You are invited to check it out… here’s the cover.

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Surrealist intermission… Home’s Garden.

Posted on 23/06/2012 by luisvrey

It’s Sunday, so it’s time for something completely different… Since I have had some enquiries about Dave Hone’s post regarding my home’s garden (the actual title of this piece!), I’d like to tell a little story. Some people know that I divide my work between the strictly scientific restorations and illustrations and  my surrealist/symbolic art. I never mix both,  but in 1988 I produced the piece you see here… a naive, dream-like Magritte-influenced mind-bending exploration of my own subconscious. Tyrannosaurus has been the Icon of many a childhood… and ironically it is only until the latest part of the twentieth century that we managed the Icon to walk properly and in the right posture!

Bu this dream is not about anatomical accuracy… it is about the Icon. Needless to say as soon as I could -that is, when I managed to have a garden- I set to try and realise the painting in 3-D  (with the essential help  and gardening abilities of Carmen, my partner). Unfortunately the T.rex (OK… Tarbosaurus bataar) couldn’t be life-size! But I don’t despair… one day… maybe… and it will always be with its back in the right horizontal posture and the tail well off the ground!

Here’s a night vision of it as it is today.

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