Here we are with the finished piece - well not quite, but it is as much as I am going to do today! 2:00 am and time for bed. That was a blast, a whole day - 15 hours of painting and blogging. All it needs now is a name: Rearing in the Rain. Umm... maybe. With that, I bid you goodnight.
Dinos in the Rain. Does this work? I don't think it is too much, do you? Maybe need more rain shafts and perhaps blur out the forest more...
So here is an hour's experimenting with rain. Certainly makes the piece more moody...
Scales now...just dots, but they work! 11pm here and craving food. Think I'll finish tonight? That's the plan. At some point we will be bringing the rain. Anyone know the best non-digital way to add the impression of rain?
Spines were added to the back of the barosaur and need to be continued down his tail. Starting to slow down...need coffee and a kick in the pants!
Details in the allosaur were added with pen, and its tail has been placed over the barosaur's tail. I like where this is going. Need to make the piece more menacing... Maybe I'll add some rain.
So this time, we've added detail to the millions of mud puddles/footprints. They should be looking more 3-D (though you may need to enlarge the pic to see it.) Time for some dinosaur detail!
Here I have darkened the dinosaurs, and I am trying to figure out the shading and where the shadows fall... It's a rainy evening, and the last light seems to be coming from behind the mountains in the background. So the shadows should fall towards the "camera," right?
Added more detail to the background forest, which I am liking much more. I really love the moment where the painting starts to leave Glendon's Ugly Phase and starts to become nice to look at. I'm not quite there yet.
Defining and darkening the ground and the dinosaurs. Need to go in and do the forest details. Had lunch.
Let there be ground! So I've begun to do the muddy, water-soaked ground, as I plan to have it raining. Need some shadows and shading. Usually not my strangest aspect of painting, so I want to focus on it.
So the dinosaurs get a base colour. I had to physically remove the red from my brush for the allosaur (who just has to be red! Why? I don't know!) Trying to get away from the norm...
Began the sky and the base colour for the forest. Think the ground will be am annoyance. Time to move onto the dinosaurs. And get food (already 2pm here in Vancouver!)
It is quite hard to see on the pic (you can enlarge any of my pics for more details!), but I have added a bit of a background. Think I'm going to go with a skewed horizon, hopefully giving a frantic feel to the piece. Not sure it is working at all. Perhaps it is just killing the "circular" flow Glendon mentioned in a previous comment... Thought?
And so we begin... with basic pencils on "canvas" paper. This is the point now where I need input on the anatomy of the animals. Did I get the proportions right?
My plan is to restore the American Museum of Natural History in New York's famous mount of the giant sauropod Barosaurus rearing-up to protect her baby from an attacking Allosaurus. This scene has been restored many times before, but it is still a favorite of mine and will be a real challenge. From the thumbnail sketches above, I think I'll be choosing the arrangement in the middle with the barosaur facing us and the allosaur in the bottom left quadrant. Just need to decide on the medium: acrylics or watercolours? 
Barosaur front view
Allosaur in front of the barosaur and baby
The end of October brings Halloween, one of my favorite holidays of the year (still trying to decide on a costume). It also brings the opening of a new Time Capsule at ART Evolved - this one labeled "Sauropods!"
But that's not all! This time around, fellow ART Evolved bloggers will be joining me in this Liveblogging Fest all weekend! Six to ten artists, all creating art LIVE and posting work-in-progesses LIVE all weekend! But where will you be able to find these amazingly talented artist's blogs? 
.jpg)
