Development (not "Evolution") of a Dinosaur Drawing

When visitors come by my corner of the cubical in the AiG offices, I'm surprised I haven't heard any of them say, "where does he get those wonderful toys?" For the amount of space I have, I've dedicated a good amount of it to dinosaur toy models and figures. Some of this is for cool decoration purposes and a bit of fun too, but there is a highly practical reason for this as well. These toys and models serve as wonderful sources of 3D reference for me. While I can't alter the pose of these models, I can position them to get the angle I need for a specific perspective and that's something you can't do with reference from paintings, drawings or photographs. And such was the case this past week as I worked on a special dinosaur project for Ken Ham. Here's a look at the steps from sketches to almost finished! I'll save the final version for later when it is a printed product. This illustration is only a part of the whole project.
This Trex was drawn start to finish on the 21 inch Wacom Cintiq and the program used was Adobe Photoshop CS6.

1. Sketches
These early, fast and loose drawings are helpful to literally start fleshing out the direction of the idea. This sketch gave me the idea to make this dinosaur with a bit of a forced perspective so the head would really come out at the viewer. You'll see the head change quite a bit from this version to the third sketch.


In this third sketch below, I've changed the head angle to make the dinosaur look at the viewer. One of my Trex models was an invaluable tool to help me get the construction of the head right. It may look funny to see me holding a toy dino in one hand while I look at it and then draw it, but the results are worth it!



2. Inks
Notice in the fourth version, the lines for the head are much cleaner then the previous version. I've started to ink the final lines for the drawing. Sometimes I sketch very specific lines prior to the inking stage, and sometimes I ink over the sketchier lines.

Again the model helped me to get a better idea of the form of the body and how the shapes of the legs, hips and torso should look from this angle.



3. Color
 With the inks nearly finished, I move on to color. This is done in layers in Photoshop. I created a shape beneath the drawing of the Trex and then color it and render it as needed. The main light source is coming from the upper left of the Trex. The colors were selected by the artist and you can't tell him, he's wrong! Were YOU there?



This was a fun project and I'd like to see a whole series of products using these forced perspective dinosaurs around AiG and the Creation Museum, drawn by me of course! But that is just a personal wish at this stage. We'll see what happens in the future. For now, it is a very small and unique series of one.