Lumpy Potato Dinosaurs

In this dev log, let’s talk about the process of drawing dinosaurs.

From an art direction standpoint, here are the primary reasons I work in a lumpy potato style:

Work within your skillset

I myself am not a paleoartist, and while I do have training in anatomical art, I don't have the training to allow me to do proper speculative anatomy.  Therefore it is more practical to focus on abstract design rather than specific representation.

Easy to design

The emphasis on basic shapes allows for quick designs that read cleanly and can be easily differentiated from each other.

It works well with low frame rate animation (i.e. work within your constraints)

I’m animating at 24 FPS on fours.  Given that I’m doing this entire project solo, everything you can do to reduce complexity helps.  Simple heavily abstracted art suffers far less at lower frame rates.

Generalized shapes work better with vagueness

One of the major challenges of drawing more obscure species is the lack of information.  Generally I try to draw from photos of an assembled skeleton, which by default makes you dependent on who decided the bone arrangement, however there are several reasons this might not pan out.

1. Minimal skeleton.  Sometimes a specimen has only a handful of preserved bones.  In these scenarios you can try to find the closest living relative on the taxonomic tree or go with the proposed skeleton which is usually sketched out in the research paper.
2. Minimal photos that can be found with a web search.  A museum might have a wonderful skeleton assembled, but I have no budget to travel there.  While no doubt people have taken pictures of the thing, they might not have posted them online or tagged them in a way that is easily discovered by a web crawler.  So all you might have available is a small number of photos with a limited range of facings.

You can partially compensate by doing 3D visualization in your own head, but that’s only a substitute. It should also be noted that the assembled skeleton may be superseded by more recent research.

General note on doing online research

Be careful of relying too much on other artists' interpretations.  Drawing creatures can become a game of “telephone”, one person passing on a distortion by another.  Interpretation of species can change over time.  There’s also the issue that sometimes people just get it wrong.  There’s a particular artist on DeviantArt who is very prolific, but at times they’re rendering a species other than the one they’ve labelled.

Just because something is beautifully rendered doesn’t make it a source of truth.