Playing

I thought I should try painting something a little different.

Other than the fact that, as far as I'm concerned, I'm still on a painting vacation, I've been wanting to take a shot at painting a dinosaur. If this is an area I might want to do more often, I'd probably still paint landscapes, but they'd contain ancient kinds of plants, and I'd have dinos instead of deer or bunnies roaming around.

The big challenge is: I have a certain casual knowledge of dinos as well as plants from the Jurassic amd Cretaceous epochs. But I'm not an expert. Going into this genre would require me to learn a lot more about ancient life forms than I know now.

And on a pragmatic level, I honestly don't know what the market is for dino paintings. Like any other subject, I'm sure I'd do better if I could afford to make inexpensive prints that parents could buy for their kids -- or even for themselves. But who knows -- I've seen a lot of dino art that is intended to show, as accurately as possible, the flora and fauna of distant times past. NO impressionism, NO semi-abstract: just detailed images that are sharp from edge to edge and top to bottom, running afoul of some of the conventions of classical realism.

So, my approach for now is to play around with a few dinosaur paintings, and we'll see where it all leads!

The image above is the painted outline of my first-ever dinosaur: it's a Utahraptor, found in southeastern Utah. They stood about 7'/2m high and thus were the size of the "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park (velociraptors were actually 3'-4'/1m high). The painting size is 8" x 10"/20cm x 25cm.