At this point, my client discovered that we had a vulture named Gus playing behind the office, and she fell in love with him.
Gus likes having his tongue rubbed.
She said, "T. rexes might have been scavengers. Gus is a scavenger too. Make the dinosaurs look like Gus!" So the next draft looked like this.
The client was pleased. At this point I convinced her to allow me to add a background, so the dinosaurs did not appear to be levitating in mid-air. I roughed in an unobtrusive landscape on a background layer in Photoshop.
After the client had approved these colors, I smoothed out the background using a textured smudge brush in Photoshop. I turned off the visibility of the top layer while I smoothed out the background layer, so this is what it looked like. I also used a rough eraser brush to make a natural-looking border to the painting.
Next I started in on the Tyrannosaurs. I wish I could enlighten you as to my technique, but all it really involved was scribbling lines and colors in greater detail until each part looked more realistic. This is why I'm not an art teacher. I don't even know how I create an image. It's just a series of mistakes that get mostly resolved intuitively. The more time I have on a project, the more the work gets fine-tuned.
My goals during the refinement process included getting rid of the outlines so that it looked less like a comic book, staying true to the colors and style of Charles R. Knight, and integrating current knowledge about dinosaurs.
Here are close-ups of different parts as I was working on them.
After very little time, I had to stop refining the image because the Jurassic World movie was opening and the artwork had to go to the screenprinter's.
I'd like to see the movie, but my client wants several more dinosaur artworks created quickly!
Thank you for reading. You can check out our other current projects on Facebook by clicking on the image in the blue box, below.
- Michelle Leveille
A client asked me to draw some dinosaurs for a line of t-shirts, which she hopes will ride along the success of the latest Jurassic blockbuster. The woman wanted them without backgrounds so she could write some text around them. She also desired that they be drawn in the style of pioneering paleoartist Charles R. Knight. I am a big fan of his work, but, I told her, his dinosaurs were tail-draggers. So she told me to update them.
Here is his drawing of dueling tyrannosaurs, which she wanted “corrected."
Original Charles R. Knight drawing
(We love this drawing! It makes us so nostalgic.)
I started by digitally sketching the animals in Photoshop with their tails held erect, their “hands" in the correct positions, and legs that were more muscular for running.
First T. rex Sketch
Next I referred to another one of Charles R. Knight's creations to determine which colors would be appropriate. Here is his painting of another pair of T. rexes.
Original T. rex painting by Charles R. Knight, used for color reference
I created another layer in Photoshop, and roughed in some dino color that matched the old painting.
