Dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are cool.
Not only that they're a good conduit for some of my obsessions:
Birds
Bestiaries and field guides
Dragons
Comparative Anatomy
To be honest during my childhood, I never had the typical all-consuming obsession with dinosaurs that boys are supposed to, but, then dinosaurs were much different back then. I liked them, to be certain and had my favorites, but back then dinosaurs were thought of as huge lizards, cumbersome slow and stupid. I was always more interested in behavior. Elephants and lions were more intriguing and tangible to me. Suddenly in the nineties, dinosaurs were reshaped as though they were made of Plasticine. Lumbering cold blooded prehistoric monsters became active, agile, well adapted animals with complex social structures. Dragging tails lifted from the ground to become elegant counterbalances. sprawling legs straightened and became muscular running limbs. Chest cavities expanded to make room for the big hearts and lungs of warm blooded creatures. Dinosaurs became beautiful and fascinating, more like birds than reptiles.
Today with the combination of new technology and amazing recent discoveries out of the deserts of Mongolia and China, dinosaurs are wilder and more wonderful than I could have ever imagined. We've discovered astounding new species and reexamined what we believed we knew. There are answers to puzzles we thought unsolvable, and exiting new lines of inquiry to explore.
In my sketchbook, I intend to concentrate mostly on the most birdlike aspect of dinosaurs- feathers. This will give me a focus and the chance to investigate some of the most captivating current notions. I intend to be as accurate as possible using the most up to date information available, but inaccuracies are inevitable as new discoveries surface. Even the great Charles R. Knight couldn't avoid this.
The color of the cardboard cover reminded me of the sort of stone where you might find fossilized tracks. I liked the monochrome of the inner cover, so I drew with coffee. The drawing is bisected by the pages so that you can't immediately see what is casting the shadow.
The dinosaur casting a long shadow is Compsognathus. They were small theropod dinosaurs about the size of a chicken. He is following the footprints of a Greater Rhea, a South American cousin of the ostrich. Without giving too much away, this is not going to be my last bird/dinosaur juxtaposition.
