Welcome to my site. After about a thousand false starts I realized I was going about this blogging business bass ackwards. For months I’d been trying to write an introductory post, and it kept tuning into a bad book. It was only after reading the early entries of some of my favorite online posters that I finally understood I don’t have to tell my entire life story, or try to explain all my questionable life choices before beginning to show you images. After all, this is an illustration site. So…

Full frontal blogging

Self-portraiture may be a pretentious beginning (I’m the one on the left), but then I’ve chosen this garish color scheme and put myself in the header. Hopefully, it won’t blind too many of you. I should mention that I don’t condone underage drinking, but Australopithecines probably matured faster than we do today and there was no danger of him driving. As far as his lack of clothing goes, please… he wouldn’t be wearing pants and I’ve spent my almost 60 years of life trying to paint animals with as much anatomical accuracy as possible. While I include human beings under the heading animals, I promise never to go for an R or X rating just to be obnoxious and certainly will never show off my own shortcomings.

Fossils of my friend here have been found in Olduvai Gorge. It makes him the perfect toastmaster, and explains the terrible pun (a gift from my son) of the title. The original idea was to create a character to narrate a series of short books about life through the Cenozoic, the last 65 million years. I saw book after popular book about dinosaurs, and although I too loved the ruling reptiles, by comparison, there were such a limited number of popular sources on mammalian and avian post-dino evolution that I thought I could use my abilities to fill in some of the blanks in an interesting way. My son also suggested I use myself as the model for Olduvai because I am exactly that 6-foot silhouette so many articles and books use for scale, and besides, I‘m always available and work cheap.

And so it begins; but not without a huge thank you to Brent Rasmussen of Unscrewing the Inscrutable. I can only attempt this because of his incredible patience with this computer neophyte, his amazing ability to write instructions I could actually understand, and his unflagging good humor and encouragement. No good deed goes unpunished however, and sooner or later I’m sure he’ll show up here befriending or being eaten by some monstrous critter.

Once upon a time

I had natural history columns in several newspapers, but that was over 20 years ago. I’m asking that you be gentle with me until I get back to where…well…the writing comes easier. I’m going to try to put up posts about some fossil animal or locale at least twice a month, complete with new illustrations. In between I’ll post work done in the past or new contracted work after it appears in print. Sometimes it might be a simple study of a bird…

…or some other living result of vertebrate evolution. Other times it may be a place in the here and now or in the past that I’ve visited, if only in my imagination.

And finally…finally…I’m not meaning to hide behind Olduvai. I’ve just been signing everything on the Internet for so long as OGeorge that it seemed the only way to go. My name is Carl Buell and I’ve been either self-employed or self-impoverished as illustrator for 40 years. At this moment I’m back in the area of my childhood in upstate New York, but I’ve lived in over 20 locations in 7 states and loved every one of them, as there was always a bird or other critter to watch or keep me company.

Most of the time I’ll portray the creatures I draw for blog posts in natural situations and surroundings. But as I did with the advanced Australopithecine in the very first image, I decided to have fun establishing the size of featured animals by using the Olduvai idea of a real human figure. Fine looking old man that I am, I will use myself occasionally, but it’s more fun to use friends (you know who you are…consider yourself warned) as models.

I’d been learning of Chris Clarke’s love affair with the desert reading his elegant prose at Creek Running North. He’s working on a book about Joshua trees and I thought it would be interesting to give him a visual that he couldn’t possibly get with his camera.

Chris Clarke in the “Way Back” machine

For a larger more detailed image click here

With Chris as a willing test subject for this initial post, I transported him 12,000 years into the past. We see him here overlooking a late Pleistocene pluvial lake somewhere near present day Death Valley. Joining Chris on the Joshua tree and juniper covered hillside are his well-loved dog-buddy Zeke and a Shasta ground sloth, Nothrotheriops.

I’m probably going to disappoint some art purists because this is a digital image, not a “real” painting. It was done in Adobe Photoshop using a Wacom Graphics Tablet. But just so there’s no misunderstanding, no photos were imported into or used in this piece except as reference. I simply started with a blank screen instead of a blank canvas. Fortunately or not, it’s the best way to do illustration for book or magazine reproduction these days. Publishers prefer a disc to traditional art as it eliminates two major steps on the way to preparing an image for printing.

I have to admit that I wouldn’t be able to do this Olduvai blog using traditional methods. It would simply take too much time. Doing the art on layers in Photoshop allows me to start the final image with a minimum of preliminary work. As I drew each element I constantly moved them around experimenting with the layout. Chris sent me half a dozen photographs of himself to work from, including a nice close-up profile. I drew him first, establishing the pose and letting that define the placement of his companions. I guess I did pretty well, because I got the nicest note from Chris’ wife Becky when I sent them a jpeg of his figure to check out.

Zeke was next, and like each of the three figures, I drew him separately. Chris has lots of good pictures of Zeke but it took almost a dozen photos for me to understand him and approach actual Zekeness to Chris’ liking. People inevitably and honestly see things in their pets that others can’t, and I have to admit, it’s rather easier to paint their children. Once completed, I had to adjust Zeke’s size a bit to fit him proportionally to Chris, but in Photoshop that takes only seconds. Having to get it all exactly right on a preliminary sketch with paper and pencil would (used to) take hours (days) and then, after transferring the image to illustration board or canvas, I’d never have been able to change it without major work.

There are of course no photo references for Nothrotheriops. However, Shasta ground sloths died out only a few (9+) thousand years ago, so there are all the skeletal elements and even hair, skin and sinew to work from. I’ll try not to do this in the future, but I have to admit that I could have gotten a ticket on my artistic license for this image. The animal I portrayed with Chris and Zeke is the Yao Ming or Shaqille O’Neil of Shasta (not quite giant) ground sloths. He’s maybe 20 to 30% too large for an average individual, but he fit there so well!

And the best part of using Photoshop for these illustrations, Nothrotheriops is completely rendered on his own layer. I can pull him out of the image and use him on his own. Those improbable feet can be shown in all their awkwardly bizarre detail.

For a larger more detailed image click here

I’ll go into all three families of North American ground sloths in greater detail in future posts, but Nothrotheriops’ feet need a little explaining. The calcaneum, the heel, is flat against the ground just like ours. The difference (among other things) is that the metatarsals are rotated nearly 90 degrees outward and are stacked on digit 5. The big claws on digits 2, 3 and 4 then point inward. The animal certainly was no speed demon, perhaps moving with the same “sloth” as his present-day, tree-hanging cousins. The large, sickle-like claws on the front feet, also on digits 2, 3 and 4, were all weight-bearing, and our beast walked on the back of the terminal phalanges. As strange as this arrangement is, it obviously worked well enough. The Nothrotheriops line, starting with small South American Miocene genera such as Hapalops lasted over 20 million years.

So at last…I’m off and running, slowly on bad knees. Today is the beginning of my 60th year of life.