John C. McLoughlin's Archosauria was published in 1979 by the Viking Press and was, let's be fair here, RIDICULOUSLY ahead of it's time. He includes some fine pointillism illustrations. He is also one of the first people to depict most of his small theropods with fluffy feathers:
These Coelurus drawings are my favorites in the book. The detail is lovely. I like the hawklike facial study in the upper-left corner (though I'm not sure how accurate it is given modern evidence). And I especially like how McLoughlin includes a copy of an old illustration of each animal, as he does in the lower-left here. McLoughlin briefly covers other members of the Archosaur... group...? (Someday I will post my Rant Against Linnaeus' Classification System.) One of these is little Longisquama (here, called Longisquamata):
Here McLoughlin gives us one of the reasons why his book is notorious: he is perhaps best known for having some... interesting ideas about prehistoric animal anatomy and behavior. Longisquama, according to McLoughlin, had only one set of those... things on his back. And he used them to trap warm air pockets for insulation. And they are, without doubt, the predecessors of feathers. I almost hate to say that it's apparently just as likely that those things on his back are leaves that coincidentally preserved along with the one known specimen of Longisquama in a suggestive position... - Rumor Debunked! See Jan's awesome comment below. (Quick version: Longisquama actually did look like this.) It's also very strange that Coelurus, Longisquama, Saltopus, and other animals of that ilk all sport a fine coat of feathers - and Deinonychus doesn't. In fact, McLoughlin's Deinonychus is just weird all around:
Something tells me that this wouldn't work... Now, to be fair, there weren't many complete fossils of dromeosaurs back in 1979. There weren't many good complete fossils of tyrannosaurs either, which goes a way in explaining Sharkface McDerpasaurus rex here:
Uh... yeah. Old dinosaur books, as we have seen, depict all hadrosaurs as swimming swamp-dwellers. McLoughlin instead depicts them, more accurately, as upland animals more akin to a really big cow than a really big duck. That said, take a look at his Parasaurolophus couple:
It's good that they're not up to their balls in a swamp, but this might be too far in the opposite direction, and we all know we ought to avoid that. :) Next is one of the most unintentionally hilarious drawings in the book:
I am in love with this drawing. You can't not love an animal that defends himself by lying down. Good jarb, Spike! You just exposed your tasty flank! Now, if you are reading this and you've already heard of John McLoughlin, then you know what I've saved for last. If this is the first time you've heard of him, boy are you in for a treat. I said, and showed, that McLoughlin had some VERY unusual theories on dinosaur anatomy. None of them are as mind-bending as what follows. Ladies and gentlemen, John McLoughlin's reconstruction of Triceratops:
Take a minute or two. Let it allllll sink in. OK? Well, here are some other ceratopsians:
I do enjoy this paragraph that ends the Ceratopsian chapter, just because it's such a great mental image (click for big):
More, and better, has been written about this theory at good old Tetrapod Zoology. It's not really surprising that this has since been debunked (essentially for just plain not working). That poor Styracosaur looks to be in pain.
Now while we're on the subject of people with weird ideas about prehistoric animals, I wonder if DavidPeters has ever written a book...
Colin Caket's Model a Monster, first published by the Blandford Press in Dorset, England in 1986, is one of my childhood favorites. This copy still has some paper mache stains in it from my failed attempts at creating the adorable models in the book. I was enthralled by all the cool art projects inside, and I'm sure this book saved many a kid during science fair season. This otherwise innocuous book about making dinosaur-centric art also takes a turn for the very, very unexpectedly weird towards the end, but we'll get to that later.
The "stars" of the book are these beautiful little balsa wood carved models. I wanted to make these so bad as a child. Heck, I still do.
Here's a simple way to recreate the super-cute Pterosaurs and cherry scene in "The Land Before Time" with some recycled shoe boxes.
And why build a snowman or sand castle when you could bring sauropod love to the beach or backyard? And speaking of sculpting things out of snow... sort of:
A stegosaurus ice cream sundae! God, that's cute! And this is basically what the book does up until around page 150, which is where things get weird. Really weird. Like, "where did I read that creepy thing as a child that still haunts my mind well into adulthood?" weird. That kind of weird. We will look at that weird part in the next post. Until then, here is some foreshadowing from page 29:
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Announcement: This Saturday is the first MA Independent Comic Expo, going by the adorable acronym, M.I.C.E.! I'd love to be able to go, but unfortunately will be away that day. Although I should be coming back with lots of sketches...
Also, my good friends over at Art Evolved have started a cancer research charity called The Pink Dinosaur Project. Please support us!
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Sketch of the day!
It's Balaur bondoc!
I like this idea but should try again with a much less wonky composition. That tail...
A treasure trove of retro-paleoart recent and otherwise, I have seen a lot of love online for Ranger Rick's Dinosaur Book (copyright 1984 National Wildlife Federation). While it never really gets as strange as Dinosaurs Discovered or the Rourke books, it's still pretty typical of dinosaur books from that time period. This one sports a wide variety of illustrators including Mark Hallett, Eleanor M. Kish, Rudolph Zalinger, and the legendary Charles R. Knight.
In case you ever doubt the impact of paleoart, think of Charles R. Knight. This drawing is one of his. Crack open an older dinosaur book and you will see this as the "default" action pose for small theropods.
In this John Dawson painting, we see an older theory about hadrosaurs that seems to (if you'll pardon the pun) no longer hold much water. They were supposed to be able to use their tails as a weapon. Exactly how this would work, what with their tails being held rather rigid by ossified tendons, I do not know.
Anyway, here are some hadros with unusually creepy eyes by Biruta Akerbergs. I have a feeling they may have been inspired by this guy...
It wouldn't be an Old Dinosaur Book review if I didn't have a Kissguanodon or a HMNH McJurassicPark Raptor, now would it? This John Dawson painting should fulfill one of those requirements at least. Love the "Aw crap" look on the Tenontosaur. And note the big Deinocheirus arms. I did a comic a while back about those arms and noted that I had a picture just like this lodged in my subconscious forever. Now I have some proof of it! Now, the problem with dinosaur books for kids is that they inevitably end on the mother of all colossal downers (mostly because older dinosaur books don't care about birds). There's really nothing I can add to this old Mark Hallett painting except that I hated it as a child and I strongly dislike it now:
I... wow. Of course, now I know why this painting bugs me: mammals galore, but where the hell are all the birds?
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A few weeks ago, this slice of crazy popped up in glorious "filmed in the dark with a shaky phone camera" vision. It has just recently been posted in "I can actually see the images onscreen" vision, and because every other "Pokemon" player has posted it, I guess I have to too. Even though this version of Pikachu and Meowth are going to haunt our dreams.
---- Announcement: So help me. I missed out on Talk Like a Pirate Day. But I'll be damned if I forget to tell you that today is Hobbit Day. Crank this tune while you read this. And remember kids, {enter obligatory snarky pipeweed joke here}!
---- Art of the Day! Gestural figure sketches from a coffee shop.
Few things are as much fun as visiting a relatively remote branch of your city library that you have not visited since childhood, and finding out that they haven't done much "weeding" since you were last there:
Oh, I had the hardest time leaving some of these. (LOL at the book at the bottom.) I've noticed there are a few blogs and other websites that have written about vintage paleoart lately. Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs often has a post about vintage dinosaur art, and has a corresponding Flickr group. Tetrapod Zoology occasionally has a neat feature about this subject as well. I stumbled upon a real treasure trove here, so I am going to have to throw my hat into the ring. Don't know if September will end up being Hilariously Outdated Paleoart Month, but anyway...
We'll start with one of the Rourke Prehistoric Animal Books. They were a library of books published circa 1984 by Rourke Enterprises, Inc. in Vero Beach, Florida. Each one focused on a different species. Usually they told of a day in the animal's life, from that animal's point of view. They were a staple of every 80's library for a long time.
Here's the title page, listing all the books from this series (there were several series within the series). I picked Archaeopteryx (sic) because I figured it would have the most comedic potential. I love the irony of that HMNH/"Jurassic Park"-style Deinonychus running beneath our heroine... (Also notable: That ain't no Ankylosaurus.) I am also kind of in love with this picture from later in the book:
Yeah... not much I can add to this.Archeopteryx is depicted with pretty wonky hand and leg anatomy throughout the book, so get used to it. Also, she has that classic "lizardbird" head and face that has only fallen out of favor in paleoart very recently. And, of course, being the only animal in the world with feathers at the time, Archy has to be the only animal allowed to be colorful too.
Over at DeviantArt, Chasmosaur immediately dubbed my "too far in the opposite direction" feathered dinosaur in "PSA Addendum" a "Sparkleraptor". And I had a good laugh over that -- and then I looked at old illustrations of Archeopteryx and realized that this is not a new thing. Almost across the board all the "nekkid" dinosaurs are the lovely shades of Crap Brown, Diarrhea Green, Intestinal Distress Puce -- while Archeopteryx looks like she wandered off the set of "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert". (By the way, if you do not know what a "sparkle-animal" is... you're probably better off.)
Remember how Dinosaurs Discovered included a weird stegosaurus with horizontal plates along with more traditional-looking stegosaurs? This book has it's cake and eats it in a similar way. Here's where it stands on the infamous "Ground Up"/"Trees Down" issue:
Not much I can add to this either. There's a brief section in the back of the book explaining some of the stuff in the main part, and they state that they wanted to show both theories. (For those of you who aren't Ornithologists, there is a lot of wank over whether the first birds started flying by wing-assisted leaping from the ground, or by aiming for the ground and missing. This is all operating under the assumption that "probably a combination of both, it depends on the particular early bird" is not an option.)
The authors also state with assertion that Archy "is really a reptile that is halfway through evolving into a bird".
I... I...
(For the non-Ornithologists, I can think of at least three or four things wrong with that old chestnut that pops up in so many dinosaur books at the time. For one thing, evolution does not work like in "Pokemon". For another, if Archeopteryx is a reptile, you and I might as well be classified as reptiles. And so on...)
The book ends with Archeopteryx actually looking more like a viable animal in her own right rather than a horrible freakish lizard-thing trapped between evolutionary levels. And she gets the company of another Kiss-guanodon too!
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Art of the Day! Here are some reptiles that have achieved their final evolutionary forms! (Yup. that's another thing I couldn't type without cringing.)
CHUD.com, a movie news website I enjoy, has been listing their choices for the worst instances of CGI animation in (usually) otherwise live-action films. They range from Wolverine's "Roger Rabbit" claws in "X-Men Origins" to the forty-two sauropod pileup in Peter Jackson's "King Kong". As a person who has blogged quite a lot about animation, I figured I should share it. Right now, they can all be found accumulating here, or you could start with part one and work your way through. I have to say, I agree with most of the selections (Part One in particular, as it covers the Scorpion King sequence in "The Mummy Returns", which is easily one of the most downright embarrassing and Narm-tacular things ever put on a screen.) I have to nitpick, however, that many of the sequences were done with the best animation available at the time and simply have not aged well. That said, a fair number of them were... not. And I agree with their argument that we wouldn't be having this discussion at all if the sequences that could have been done practically were. Take entry ten, the "Burly Brawl" in "Matrix Reloaded". Now, when I saw that at the theater I thought it was awesome. Then when I watched it again last summer it was still awesome... up until a point. There is a moment, and you can tell exactly where it is, when the film-makers eschewed practical effects and stuntwork for motion capture. This is about the only scene in the entire trilogy where they do so and... man, it just sticks out like you can't imagine. It looks like something out of "Happy Feet' and happens to be the only really badly animated scene in the trilogy.
"You birds have a hundred thousand bad drawings in you; start getting rid of them now."
— Chuck Jones, quoting one of his art school instructors
I should preface this by saying that the basement is mostly clean now. Yay!
Also, as you've noticed, I don't usually comment on current events. But given that my aunt in Florida called us this weekend to ask if we were okay, I think maybe this calls for it.
We're fine. The pipe burst is mostly affecting the city of Boston proper, but the water supply to the suburbs has been diverted to an alternate reservoir. The only thing is, it hasn't been treated to kill the possible naturally occurring bacteria, so we shouldn't drink it in large quantities unless we want to crap out a kidney later (obviously younger and older people, and people who have very little built-up tolerance to bacteria shouldn't drink anything but bottled or boiled water at all). We can do pretty much anything else with the water, though I've held off laundry and washing dishes for a while just to be on the safe side.
The thing that gets me is the reason why I hate televised news. You'd think our tap water had been hooked up to a vat of battery acid the way they've been going on about it. It's just lake water, calm the heck down! Generally speaking, I made better art in high school than I did in my first year in college. That may sound counterintuitive, but I'm pretty sure you're going to agree with me when you look at what I dug up.
I had completely forgotten about the paintings and drawings you are about to see. I thought they were lost forever and, honestly, I wasn't too sad about that. These are probably my least favorite college pieces, which is why this is the only place you'll ever see them online.
Remember when I found the painting from high school and said that it made me realize just how much figurative space there is between the person who drew it and the person currently looking at it? And how the scary part comes in when I realize both those people are me? Yeah. In hindsight, that painting was whimsical and cute. A lot of these paintings are freakin' scary.
(It should also be noted that these were all created in a small dorm room with thin, thin walls -- and the guy who lived on the other side of the wall liked to blast his favorite album over and over and over. That album was "My Own Prison".)
Aaaaaaa-ny-way...
This is pretty typical of my early-college output. I obviously hadn't got used to using watercolors yet; many of the characters blend into each other and into the background. Some of those character designs are just awful, but I kinda like the werewolf guy in the lower-right. I'll be on Team him.
The assignment was to design a set of paper goods for a Halloween party. One of the requirements was the snazzy display you see this piece mounted upon.
It should be noted that our professor was an older gentleman. According to him, in our professional careers, we'd always have to send the original artwork through the mail, mounted in such intricately cut matboard displays. That's the way he did it. It was 1998, and as far as he was concerned - and WE were concerned- computers were for writing essays and playing "Doom" and "Tetris", not for making art. Certainly, never for *delivering* art. That's unpossible!
(This has been your Funny Aneurysm Moment for the day.)
I remember mentioning in an earlier post that I was not blessed with the ability to create three-dimensional artwork. These guys, made for a project in high school, attest to this.
They aren't the only sculpture I found. This next one comes from one of the strangest aspects of my first year of college. The way UMass' Fine Arts track went, we were all required to take both 2-D and 3-D art classes no matter what our actual major was. You wound up with sculptors struggling to paint and painters having to try and wield sculpting tools without losing a finger. A couple of students in my classes actually complained about how pointless this was, and the professors countered this with, "Oh, well, we wanted to let you try out all kinds of art! So you're going to spend your entire first year of college doing stuff you hate! Misery builds character!"
So that's why I -- the only 2-D major in a class of 3-D majors (whew, that was all kinds of fun) -- had to spend four hours a week building things that *sort of* resembled what they were meant to be out of matboard and balsa wood and tons and tons of hot glue gun glue, instead of taking that computer graphics class that looked cool but always filled up fast and ran the same time as something pointless I had to take in order to graduate. (This is your second Funny Aneurysm Moment of the day.)
Anyway, here's what I made when I was told to do a relief sculpture out of clay, which would be the mold for the plaster final version seen here:
I am very, very curious to know if anybody out there gets what I was going for here. Because *NOBODY* in my class did.
So what was I producing in the 2-D class?
OK. This image was not my idea, it's the result of Professor Meddling. MY original version of this "parody a print ad" assignment looked more like this. Ironically, this is much closer to what I can do now:
Guess what version I like better. Go on! And let me say right now that the "Professor Approved" version (which I never questioned at the time and probably should have) is NOT the most embarrassing thing I'm going to share with you today...
I don't even know! I DON'T EVEN KNOW!!!
(Trish goes to the fridge, pours herself a pint of UFO White out of the Growler, and downs half of it in preparation for this next... THING...)
In case it isn't obvious, this isn't the whole painting (my first -and last- ink wash). It's just a small excerpt. You HAVE to trust me when I tell you that this is the LEAST scary and/or inappropriate part of this illustration I could have posted online for all to see. Of all the old art we've seen today, this is the only piece that genuinely made me upset and ashamed.
Now, let me assure you that this was also part of an assignment and it also was not my idea. I remember the context rather vividly and I really did not want to make this drawing; I don't think anyone else in my class was really thrilled about this assignment either. There wasn't anything we could do without getting really offensive.
The assignment was to do a political cartoon about a then-recent historical event (circa late-summer 1997, and that's the only context you're getting). And when I say "then-recent", I mean it. Like, it happened the week before we got the assignment, WAY too soon for us innocent little illustration newbies to really digest how we actually felt about the event. Maybe professional political cartoonists eventually develop the ability to immediately comment on something that is traumatic on a very large scale; we sure hadn't. Hence the monstrosity you see before you. Ugh. Just ugh.
I need to go to the Old Shame TV Tropes page, so I know everybody has something like this. Also...
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Sketch of the Day!
Actually, I'm going to cheat and show off a finished piece I really like. Look at this classy Icthyosaur. I sketched him before I came up with my final idea for Art Evolved's Icthyosaur Gallery. I still liked him, so I went ahead and brought him to final:
Note: In case there are any art directors out there, ignore everything else on this page; this is what I can do now.
