During my college freshman summer when I was doing my first internship. I bought paints to have something to do after work, as this was the first time in my life I didn’t have homework. This summer, I painted several simple dinosaur paintings!
So why dinosaurs? As a kid, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, and this aspect is something most people still associate with me. I didn’t necessarily feel like I HAD to only paint dinosaurs, but they felt like a reasonable default subject to use to practice different styles. The first painting I did was a somewhat abstract one, where my primary intent was to just practice painting clean lines, but I do like how it turned out.
For my second painting, I wasn’t actually intending to paint a dinosaur, I just wanted to try doing shading. This meant individually mixing several different colors and just painting them on progressively from light to dark. On the first day of painting, I just did the background since I wasn’t sure what to put on the foreground. One of my friends suggested doing a dinosaur because I “always draw dinosaurs everywhere anyways”. I couldn’t argue with that logic.
Next, I wanted to try doing some proper shading where I just had 1 light color and 1 dark color and mixed them on the paper itself. I looked up videos of people shading cubes, spheres, and cylinders, and realized a dinosaur was basically just a bunch of those put together. I think this one came out very cute!
I discovered Bob Ross shortly before painting this one and wanted to try painting a landscape, including elements like a sunny sky, water, and a tree. I don’t think the composition or implementation of this one came out great, but I was still able to squeeze a dinosaur in!
After doing a daytime landscape, I felt the natural next step was nighttime. When I was painting the moon, I started with a white circle and started adding on some grey blotches, but realized it was too much, so I quickly blotched off the grey with a paper towel. This created the effect you see on the painting, which I was very pleasantly surprised with!
This is definitely my favorite. I had seen aerial photos of camels and elephants in landscapes where the animal itself is hardly visible, but the shadow is clearer, showing a horizontal view of the animal’s silhouette. I decided to make that with dinosaurs! At this point, I had gotten a wide, stiff brush, which was quite fun to use and lead to the broadstrokes texture of the sand. I also tried to make the shadows of the dinosaurs show how the baby dinosaurs were fatigued by the travel.
