The Dino Is Done!

If you happened to read my blog post dated 3 Sep entitled "Playing," you would have seen the black-on-white outline of a dinosaur that I included with the text.

And here's the finished painting!

This is a Utahraptor whose fossils were found in southeastern Utah. It stood 6'-7'/2m high and is more likely what was featured in the Jurassic Park movies (velociraptors were actually 3'-4'/1m). Although this region of Utah is quite desert-y today, during the Cretaceous period when these things lived, the habitat was more tropical.

I've often toyed with the idea of making a few dinosaur paintings, and I don't know that this genre would ever take over the landscapes I do now. But it's fun to do something a little different once in a while. Dinos are also more difficult to do that I first thought; after all, there are no living specimens to study and/or photograph, yet dinosaurs need be anatomically correct nevertheless as far as the fossils are concerned.

But it was fun to do, it's a small-scale painting (8" x 10"/20cm x 25cm) and I even think of it as a bit of a self-portrait. Sometimes I feel like I've been around since the time when dinosaurs ruled the earth!