Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Evolution of Koolasuchus

Here are six different stages of the development of the new Koolasuchus stamp from Australia Post. The first two are in pencil, drawn from imagination while looking at the fossil diagrams. The third is painted in gouache and colored pencil.

When I made the maquette from Sculpey, I understood better how I could give the pose more twist. And I could turn the form in real sunlight to see exactly where the light and shadow divided. The comprehensive layout at center is drawn in charcoal on vellum. This was the map for the final oil painting.
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You can purchase a set of the stamps or other philatelic products from Australia Post at this link. (Reasonable shipping to anywhere in the world).

And you can get an instant digital download of my instructional art documentary (watch the trailer on YouTube) about the making of the stamps at:
Gumroad (for credit card payments).
at

5 comments:

  1. babangada rSeptember 24, 2013 at 5:21 PM

    if you have time, i would be interested in
    how and why did your color choices evolve?

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  2. Nadina CardilloSeptember 24, 2013 at 10:39 PM

    Great work as always. Your work process has really shaped the way I go about my own work. When I first picked up your books about two years ago I was shocked at the amount of care and dedication you put into everything. "Imaginative Realism" was a turning point for me because it taught me how much care and dedication it actually took to do something great. As the months went by it taught me much more, of course.

    If you guys want a quick laugh, imagine my face when I realized that copying a manga-style eye a thousand times wasn't teaching me anything about drawing. My world shattered! But oh God, the new world that opened up is so beautiful...

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  3. PaleoPhilatelistSeptember 25, 2013 at 3:19 AM

    really appreciate your effort and time you spent to create realistic as possible stamps. I wish every stamp designer does so, but unfortunately, last time (since 1994 about) there are a lot of stamps produced by countries like Guinea, Mozambique, Togo .... where designers spent very little effort to draw prehistoric creatures, and not really care how realistic the are looks. Thank you so much for a great work !

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  4. Tom HartSeptember 25, 2013 at 8:45 AM

    Another great post. (I never tire of saying that because it's true.)

    Your recent mention of charcoal drawing in the preliminary stages has inspired me to pull out my charcoal and put it to use in sketching, and that has also prompted me to wonder why (at least in my experience) charcoal seems to have been consigned to the back shelf. It's such an easy, malleable and inexpensive medium, and it allows an almost incomparabe range of tones. Sure there are issues of smudging and charcoal dust. But they aren't insurmountable problems. I'm not sure I understand why it fell off of my radar for so long.

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  5. David GlennSeptember 25, 2013 at 5:21 PM

    So how did you find out about these individual species? And how did you decide on what colors to use for the animals?

    ReplyDelete

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