Art Corner: An introduction to drawing Dinosaurs
Hello! Iām one of the illustrators here at PalaeoVerse, and today Iām going to be doing a quick introduction to how I draw prehistoric animals. In this postĀ Iāll walk through the main steps we use in reconstructing a Dinosaur. For this I will be doing a simple reconstruction of Triceratops horridus, but these steps are key to reconstructing any prehistoric animal.Ā
To start with, seeing as all we have to go on are fossils, youāre going to need some images of fossils - pictures, drawings, even 3D models are fantastic, as they allow you to understand the shape of the animal youāre going to draw. Itās also great to go to a museum and look at the fossils if possible.
Iāve decided to grab a picture of a Triceratops mount from the American Museum of Natural History,
as well as a skeletal drawing by Scott Hartman (these are really useful for proportions, and Hartman is trusted throughout the scientific community when it comes to quality and up to date skeletal illustrations.)
Okay. Now that we have our initial reference images, itās time to start sketching for rough proportion and shape, as well as where major bones and joints are and how they attach. Itās also important to look at where holes in the skull are, as they give the locations of jaw muscles and also where the eyes were. Iāve done a quick sketch at this stage of the reconstruction, as well as some studies of the feet from a front on view with the inside toes on the left. (Note that once you have the proportions, you can also change the pose to whatever you want. Iāve just gone for a simple standing stance because itās easiest.)
Once youāve reached this stage and understand the basic shape, you need to start looking for where the soft tissue might be. Hartmanās drawings have soft tissue outlines, but you can also take inspiration from living animals like birds to get an idea of where muscles are. Our example, triceratops, was a herbivore, and would have needed to eat throughout the day, so we can pretty confidently say he had something of a gut. He also weighed between six and twelve metric tonnes (thatās about 13,000 to 26,000 lb for you imperials), so his legs would have been pretty stocky.
One thing you have to be conscious of when reconstructing an organism from a fossil is to avoidĀ āshrink-wrappingā, or in, other words, keeping the skin tight to the body so that individual muscles and even bones are distinctly visible. Many Dinosaur reconstructions fall victim to this, but real animals have fat and loose skin. Itās important to remember that Dinosaurs were real animals, too.
Hereās my rough soft tissue outline. Itās not crucial to stick exactly to your sketches this early on, and you can add details later.
Now that we have our rough form sketched in, we should look at what this guy might have been covered in. Most of the time, there is little to go on for Dinosaur integument (fancy word for coverage - scales, feathers, fur, etc.), but we actually have fossils showing us how Triceratops may have looked.
These fossils give a detailed insight into what Triceratops looked, and show roughly polygonal scales covering the body with larger scutes spaced randomly on the flanks.
Along with these impressions, we can also look to relatives of our Dinosaur. Psittacosaurus, a small ceratopsian from the early Cretaceous, has been discovered to have had stiff quills down the back of its tail (these are visible in the top right of this photo.)
From this we can determine that Triceratops may have had similar structures running down its tail.
Now we know what our Dinosaur may have looked like, we can start to draw details. I have given Triceratops scaly skin, with scutes on the flanks and short quills on the tail. I have also given an obvious keratinous sheath to the beak, which would have been used to cut through tough vegetation.
And finally, we need to add colour. Itās hard to say what colour Dinosaurs were. Some, if youāre lucky, actually have preserved pigments, and we can tell what colours they were. However, these are extremely rare, and ninety percent of Dinosaur colouration is educated guesswork. For Triceratops, we have nothing. This is where we look to the environment the animal lived in and what lifestyle it was likely to have had. Triceratops lived in a warm but fairly lush ecosystem. There were few dense forests, but ferns and small trees would have been plentiful. I have decided to give Triceratops mainly earthy colours - greys, yellows, ochres, namely - in order that it would not stick out like a sore thumb, yelling: āEat me, T. rex! Eat me!āĀ
Having said this, however, a widely supported theory is that the bony crest at the back of the head would have been used as a display feature. For this reason I have added a red pattern to the cheeks and crest.
And there you go! This is a quick colour and line illustration, but the same principles apply to large scale paintings for museum and books. These main steps apply to reconstructing any Dinosaur, be it Triceratops or Velociraptor or Brontosaurus, and using them you can draw your own scientifically accurate Dinosaur!
I hope you found this post useful, and you can message us with suggestions of what to cover in future here at Art Corner, and also if you have any tips yourself!
Thank you for reading, and see you next week for another PalaeoVerse Art Corner blog!
Sources:
http://www.skeletaldrawing.com/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Triceratops_AMNH_01.jpg
http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/replica-of-rare-triceratops-skin-goes-on-
display-in-hill/article_2b66c924-bcce-5c0d-bcbb-806cec3d1209.html
