In an early concept for a dinosaur parade scene I tried a profile view of a small group of humans and dinosaurs bedecked in colorful costumes.
There's a horn-drum on an Ankylosaurus to set the tempo. I realized I needed to pull back the view to show the whole parade.
I love your Dinotopian Parade scene here. I did a chestnut character parade with the last littlest nut representing the American Chestnut tree, and he's drooping his shoulders as he feels he should be the leader, as he's representing the oldest of this type of tree. Wish I could show it to you. It was fun.
ReplyDeleteVirginia Rinkel
This touches on a question I’ve been struggling with for a while: How do you pick which aspects of a story (like Dinotopia) to illustrate?
ReplyDeleteNaturally some scenes have an innately cinematic quality that almost beg to be painted (such as a parade), but there’s also the smaller moments. Why, for example, might you decide to do a vignetted portrait of Bix or Crabb, vs showing them in situ like Enit and Nallab in the library? Is it an instinctive choice—what feels right or needed or fun—or are there logical considerations to be weighed, a list of criteria to be compared against? Or, most likely, some combination thereof?
In short, when you could illustrate every scene and character in your book, what makes you pick the ones you end up doing, and which are close details vs expansive vistas?
Timothy, great question. I'll try to answer it in a Substack post.
ReplyDeleteVirginia: Chestnut Parade. What a fun idea.