Our tremendous trio is back for 2024, but not all things are as they were… mostly they are, though. We get back into the swing of Vintage Dinosaur art, or is that Nostalgic Dinosaur Art? We explore the work of Mark Hallett, the man Marc once declared his Favourite Palaeoartist Ever, as it appears in Stephen and Sylvia Czerkas’ Dinosaurs: A Global View, also featuring works by John Sibbick and Douglas Henderson. Then, Marc and Natee interview Andy Frazer, also…
Whenever I’ve reviewed books from the United States in the past, it’s tended to be because a kind reader has either scanned their pages, or simply sent me the whole thing via international mail. (Thanks again, Herman!) This one, however, turned up rather unexpectedly on eBay, sold by an online second-hand bookshop in the UK. It’s part of the ‘Honey Bear Books’ series published by Modern Publishing (“a division of Unisystems, Inc.” of New York), which appears to have been…
Over a decade go, on the blog’s previous incarnation, I wrote a slightly unusual Vintage Dinosaur Art article about a single poster. Said artwork was produced to accompany the officially endorsed Natural History Museum (or, as it properly was at the time, British Museum (Natural History)) dinosaur toy line, made by Invicta Plastics of England. At the time, I mentioned that I knew of two posters, both with the same theme (an Age of Reptiles-esque seamless transition through time), but…
Or Norman: Into the Normanverse What book casts a longer shadow than David Norman’s 1985 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs? Which dinosaur reconstructions are more iconic, more widely seen and more frequently copied than John Sibbick’s? What book has been referenced more frequently on these pages than the one we still affectionately call the Normanpedia? Will this whole review consist of rhetorical questions? Today, I want to talk about a book by David Norman that came out a mere three…
Time for another round of The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. No, not that one – the one from 1988, written by Mary Elting and illustrated by Christopher Santoro. As an aside, I didn’t say too much about Santoro last time, and I probably should have. He’s an accomplished and much-lauded illustrator of children’s books with (as of today) over 30 years’ experience (as per a number of near-identical bios that appear on various publishers’ websites, like HarperCollins). He’s not…
It can sometimes feel like, after countless (well, 10 or 11) years of scouring eBay, I’ve dug up virtually every popular dinosaur book from the ’80s and ’90s that could possibly be found. It doesn’t help matters that a large number of them feature a gloomy parade of depressingly sub-par Sibbick rip-offs, and therefore blend easily into one another, like a great amorphous blob of weird leathery flesh and plagiarism. And yet – and yet, not two weeks ago I…
Last time, as we took our first look at the treasure trove of unique palaeoart that is The Great Dinosaurs, a lot of people seemed blindsided by just how good Jan Sovák’s art is. Although there are plenty of 90s tropes to go around, there is definitely something timeless about Sovák’s style that sets him apart from the trends of the day. His work just has an artistic flair that is distinct from the hyperreal dioramas of Sibbick, Paul, Robinson…
As discussed in the previous post, the artist most frequently referenced by Giuliano Fornari in illustrating The Great Dinosaur Atlas was John Sibbick. Specifically, art from the Normanpedia was often quite slavishly copied, right down to particular colour choices. As such, when Fornari shifts gears and opts to, er, pay tribute to the work of other palaeoartists with wildly contrasting styles, the effect is very jarring. Sibbick’s Normanpedia work, while beautifully executed and hugely influential, was also a little retrograde…
Back in the early 1990s, John Sibbick’s artwork for the Normanpedia (that is, 1985’s The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, authored by David Norman) was simply everywhere. There was no escaping it. Pick up a magazine – Sibbick. Box of chocolate-coated biscuits – Sibbick. Breakfast cereal – Sibbick. Naturally, the ubiquity of Sibbick’s gorgeously painted, but rather idiosyncratic, illustrations from the mid-’80s resulted in a huge number of imitators and outright copycats – there was even a mysterious company apparently named…
Last month, I finally got around to reviewing the Eyewitness Dinosaur video from 1994, part of a series spun off from the Eyewitness Guides books published by Dorling Kindersley. It occurred to me then that I’d never actually reviewed the Dinosaur book itself, which prompted a quick scouring of eBay for a copy – preferably as old and cheap as possible. Having bought what I thought was a 1989 edition for less than the price of a pint, I was…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.