My Paleoart Year

2020’s been a weird one, but I have managed to create some paleoart. I don’t write much about my own work, so I thought it would be fun to round up what I’ve been up to in this post. Hope you enjoy!

First up is my newest one. I was very excited to see this one hit the web this week. It is the initial design in Studio 252mya’s Paleo Parks poster series. I chose to do the Kaiparowits Formation. This series, inspired by travel posters, seeks to immerse the viewer in an environment rather than to heavily feature a particular animal. I loved the idea of seeing a pair of Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus through the mists of a swampy jungle in late Cretaceous Utah. It was a lot of fun to create. I’m really excited to see the collection grow!

Going back to the summer, I was inspired by my morning walk to created a scene in a crepuscular woodland. I chose a mother Therizinosaurus and her chicks as my animals, with a curious Adasaurus lurking in the background…

This spring, I created this scene from the Horseshoe Canyon environment. The piece started with the idea for the foreground framing device, with Didelphodon and an enantornithe perched on a thick vine. I had never drawn Hypacrosaurus before, here designed with a color scheme strongly contrasting with the environment.

The Invertefest social media event inspired me to finish up a long-gestating idea of using a ceratopsid head as the “landscape” for an insect piece. The scale might be a bit iffy, admittedly. I just say it’s not a full grown Triceratops. And it’s a pretty big ichneumonoid wasp. Yeah. That works.

The Bromacker Paleoart Contest inspired me to do try some old tricks in new ways. I’m always into the idea of portraying insects and vertebrates in ways that flip the usual script. When looking at the research materials Joschua Knüppe so generously put together for contest participants, I was captured by the idea of little Tambachia and a large palaeodictyopterid encountering each other. I enjoyed doing a more overhead view, and playing with pattern and texture in this one.

A more recent piece was this simple one of a diving Quetzalcoatlus. This was all about playing with the shapes of an azhdarchid, and I loved the idea of seeing something like this happen. Like the Bromacker piece above, I also stretched out from my usual choice of perspective, setting this one high above the Cretaceous world.

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Thanks for indulging me! You can see more of my paleoart at DeviantArt and Artstation, and purchase art and other merch from Redbubble, Etsy, and Studio 252mya. And of course, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter.