Sunday, January 29, 2017

BoarCroc Maquette


(Link to video) Here's a mini-video I made to show a reference maquette I built.


It helped me figure out the lighting for this reconstruction of "BoarCroc" or Kaprosuchus.

3 comments:

Daniel New said...

Beautiful maquette and painting! Living in florida and seeing this, its very easy to imagine seeing these guys hanging out next to our modern alligators.

I am always baffled by the construction and execution of skin/scales in paleo art. When drawing or painting animals like crocs, snakes, or fish there are so many particular scales to deal with and they all need to fit the form and adhere to perspective and lighting etc.

Do you have any favorite methods for achieving accuracy when dealing with the complexity of detail for the skin/ scales?

James Gurney said...

Thanks, Daniel. One way to get skin/scale textures is to make a rigid stamp of the negative texture that you want, then stamp the surface of the Sculpey. Alternately you can do it with regular sculpting tools. That's how I did this maquette. For this creature, I was able to study a lot of living crocs for inspiration about pattern and distribution of scales. Other than that, the way to get accuracy is to draw a profile drawing, and keep to its measurements with a set of calipers.

Faisal Tariq said...

Lovely, Do you sculpt as avidly as you paint/sketch? If so where can I see more of your sculptures? Thanks