Raptor's Nest

Continuing on from where I left off last time, I've been painstakingly coloring in my Allosaurus line drawing using Adobe Illustrator. This is my first attempt at a dinosaur drawing with Illustrator. First of all, I just colored in the basic colors and added 'scutes' (?) and scales and what not. Then, I started adding in shades using black and light areas using white. I used black and white hoping that by making them transparent would have the effects of shading and hi-lighting. And it seemed to work. The beauty of this is that I now have a generic shade/lighting pattern that is consistent regardless of the undertone colors. But getting it right took a lot of time and loads of trial and errors... But then, I realised my Allosaurus looks too glossy and looks more like an amphibian or one of those old 1950's- 1960's reconstructions. So I added in a whole load of scaley patterns again with black and made them transparent. For simplicity, I just made a handful of litt...

Okee dokey - continuing on with the theme, I've started tracing out this hand-drawn Allosaurus . The original was drawn ages ago - I can't really remember when. But it's up on my website ( http://www.geocities.jp/raptors_nest_theropoda/ ). Anyway, since I already have a digital version, all I need to do now is to import it into Illustrator and trace it out. The next step is to use the Pen Tool and just manually trace out the outline of the drawing. This is actually quite time consuming and it's taking as long or longer than it'd take me to draw a dinosaur from scratch... Now this is what it looks like with the tracing and the coloured-in eyeball superimposed (right). And without the original (left). Unfortunately, this is as far as I got today, and my neck and back is starting to hurt since I've been crouching in front of my laptop for over 2 hours now....I'll resume some time later and start on colouring - I am not looking forward to that process. Actually...

Umm....so, this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with dinosaurs, palaeontology or science at all, but I just drew an imaginary fighter jet. Here's the rough sketch to the left. I scanned this into my computer and used Illustrator to trace half the outline and coloured it all in and flipped a duplicate to make it all symmetrical. Then exported it as a gif and used Photoshop to add in the details like shades, scorches, and oil stains. The result is below. It's still rough but I was just having a bit of fun. I guess I could brush up on this technique and apply it to dinosaur drawings...that'd be pretty cool.