Actually do try it! If you have any artistic talent at all, a Wacom Graphics Tablet and a layered art or retouching program like Photoshop can make you better quicker than drawing with pencil and paper.

It’s a matter of what you’re after, but I use Photoshop because I like the setup, I like the tool selection, and mostly because it’s what I had to learn on. The Wacom Graphics Tablet is an unbelievably wonderful bit of technology. The tablet is pressure-sensitive and the feel of the stylus on it is very much like the feel of a felt-pen on vellum.

I was worried at first, but it took me all of about 10 minutes to get used to drawing on the Tablet while looking at the computer screen. It’s so much a part of the way I work now; I actually have more problems looking at the paper when I use a pencil.

About 3 weeks ago I said I wanted to have as my first real Olduvai post a mini-mural of Proboscideans in America. Because of problems with Tito, lack of sleep, and a sudden influx of “paying” jobs, I’m more than a bit late. Sorry about that. But I am working on it and I’d thought you might be interested in seeing just how I’m going to create the animals for the “mini-mural” post. There will be 7 species portrayed and more than 1 individual of most of them.

Welcome to my world. I’m lucky this time, because I’ve drawn so many mammoths over the past 15 years that their proportions are burned into my brain. Most have been the late Pleistocene Mammuthus columbi/jeffersoni, (We’ll get into the actual taxonomy later) from the population of the northern plains represented at the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs, South Dakota (dated 26,000 years BP). Strange as it may sound, I know some of the animals there as individuals, complete with photos of skulls and charts of bone length and mass and tusk diameter.

Setting up the Photoshop Screen

Working for the computer I don’t need to be as detailed as I am for publication, but I still like to work large enough so that I can get a decent image from my home printer. For the proboscideans post I decided to work on a panel 6 inches high at 300dpi. That will give me great prints, and at the same time have more than enough detail to fill a computer screen. The “mini-mural” will be as long as it turns out to be in order to give everything room. On screen it will be about 8.5 inches high and, by the time I’m done, about 40 inches wide. While the scene will be continuous, each species will be highlighted in an area easily within a single screen viewing.

I NEVER draw on the background, but keep it white or a neutral gray. Open layer 1 and start as you would with a pencil or marker. Here’s my layer 1.

You can’t see the tiny dots, but I measured approximate bone length and proportions. Sometimes I think I don’t really draw well at all, I just edit well. This is going to be a fairly static pose, so I immediately open layer 2 and start refining. I’m using the airbrush tool at a fairly large size (20 pixels or so). Notice that I’ve gone back to layer 1 and moved the opacity bar to about 20% so the new lines don’t get mixed up with the old ones. Here’s my layer 2.

Layers 3 and 4 are more refining. 3 the work is primarily on the head, and 4 the legs. Notice I’ve moved the trunk and flexed the left front leg. Elephants give the impression of being loose-jointed and yet when the weight is being borne by the leg it’s locked into a column.

With layer 4 I was satisfied enough to start the coloring process. Layer 5 is opened UNDER layer 4 and a flat (slightly brownish) gray is used as fill. On layer 4 the black lines are made about 60% transparent and merged down on layer 5.

It’s may sound funny, but from here on the work is as much tenacity as talent. Paint wrinkles, adjust, merge down. Paint wrinkles, adjust, paint shadows (on a layer above the main image, never use black, but very dark blues thru reds), adjust, merge down. Paint wrinkles, adjust, paint shadows, merge down (always doing the “new” work on a new layer). If at any point something starts looking strange you can always undo everything back to last time you hit “save”. Sometimes I’ll do as little as a half dozen lines on a layer before I merge it. The trick is to know when to save. Another way to experiment is after saving, duplicate the entire piece as an alternate. Change the contrast or color pallet. Photoshop gives you a hundred ways to experiment with your art.

Layers 6 and 7 show the beginning detail of the head. I always work on the head first, because I don’t want to waste too much time on anything else if I can’t get that right.
Because of the scale here I don’t have to worry about the eye too much, but in any smaller creature or in a close-up of the elephant’s head with its 4 inch eye-lashes, another great feature of digital art comes into play. I don’t have to wear a magnifier or more powerful glasses and paint with a one bristle brush. Ctrl/Alt + and I can get close enough to work on individual pixels. My old eyes love it!

Layer 8 shows the work on the other end. The four little buttons of color are my highlight pallet and touching one with the cursor as you hit Alt immediately gives you that color to work with. In the good old days I’d be gone to the sink for the fourth time by now to get clean water.

In layer 9 I’ve traced the outlines of the far side limbs on to a new superimposed layer, and begin working on those limbs on yet another layer below the main image. Yes, I can draw and paint behind the main image, that’s the reason you never want to work on the “background” of your Photoshop “canvas”.

On layer 10 I’m getting close. In about an hour I can cover this Columbian Mammoth with sparse but noticeable hair. Throughout the entire process, I’ve experimented, I’ve molded, I’ve moved and resized. The lasso tool and the blending tool are my particular friends. So here we are about 7 hours after beginning. At this point I don’t want to do anything more until all the animals are done and integrated into the landscape background. I’ll be changing things until the very moment the mini-mural is posted.

And oh yeah, I can flip this guy too. In fact, I’ve flipped him horizontally a dozen times during the process. It gives you a whole new look at things you might have missed.

For a closer look click here

When the mural is up (and yes, I’ve learned not to open my mouth only to insert my foot) we’ll talk about mammoth hair and tusk curves and I’ll answer any questions about why I portrayed something the way I did. I hope I haven’t bored too many of you that don’t know Photoshop, but if enough people like this post, I’m thinking about putting up a how-it-was-done on the painting of the background too. Think clone tool!

It Was A Mouse

The past few nights with Tito have been tough. Not much sleep again but it’s slowly getting better. I sat with him a long time last night just petting him as he finally went to sleep. There were no lights on, just a candle on the shelf next to the window. It happened very quickly, just a fleeting moment’s pause on a run back to the wall’s protection.

Every winter a couple of deer mice find their way into the old house for warmth, and remembering how low on the food chain I’ve been a few times in my life, I just haven’t got the heart to kick them out. It’s probably not a good idea to share too much of your living space with mice, but there’s never been a case of hantavirus in New York and all my cupboards are well sealed.

I wasn’t going to do anything for the “war on Christmas” this year, but that image stuck with me and this evening I thought why not. Why not share that instant in time when the world consisted of a man, his old dog and a mouse. It’s not much; I only had a couple hours, but please know that I appreciate all of you who have visited the site. Tito, the mouse and I, warmly wish you all…

Tito’s Friend

As I mentioned yesterday, my old dog Tito has been having night terrors. The medication he’s on takes time to build up in his system, but last night was another tough one. It’s hard watching your old friend in difficulty when nothing you do seems to help. The vet warned me about this because the tranquilizers I had been giving him can’t be administered as the new medication takes hold. During the day he still enjoys the snorts and walks, and his eyes are still bright and clear, so I’m not ready to love him enough to let him go. It hasn’t come to that yet.

Back when I first started thinking about Olduvai in book form I painted this piece in acrylic on illustration board. Tito is only 9 here and still in possession of the beautiful demarcation across his chest that he lost (along with life number 5) on a horseshoe stake buried in snow. The picture is a little grainy and not as clean as the art in my earlier posts, but I had only an old low resolution scan to work with. For comparison, Tito is 26 inches at the shoulder.

For a slightly larger if somewhat fuzzy image click here

Tito’s friend here is the North American species of scimitar cat, Homotherium serum. Most people are familiar with the classic saber-tooth, Smilodon, the “tiger” of La Brea Tar Pits fame, but relatively few know of this unusual cat. As you can see, Homotherium (literally “man’s beast” because the first fossils of the European species were found in association with human remains and artifacts – it’s not clear who was eating who) had a markedly different body type from most felids. The head was held high on the long, strong neck. The forelegs were elongated, while the hind quarters were rather squat with feet perhaps partially plantigrade.

While the 9 inch (+) daggers of Smilodon were somewhat laterally flattened, the 5 inch canines of Homotherium were razor-sharp blades, serrated both front and back. These were not teeth for holding on to struggling prey animals. Suffocating or throttling or crushing a victim was not the scimitar cat’s MO. This was a very fast felid of open country with acceleration and agility. The most likely form of attack would have been a lightning fast slash producing a profusely bleeding wound. It would have been awfully tough to watch on Animal Planet, but allowed Homotherium to strike prey as large as not-so-young mammoths. In a cave in Texas, the bones of both adult scimitar cats and cubs have been found in association with a large number of (mostly juvenile) mammoth and mastodon teeth.

I apologize for jumping around so. Some day I’ll have enough images to put them in some sort of order as to time and location and make better connections. But then again, I guess a blog is supposed to be forever a work in progress.

Well, it’s the 22nd, and the proboscideans post I promised isn’t ready. Unfortunately, one does have to eat and in my case right now, pay vet bills. About a month ago my old dog Tito (he’s 16) started having what can only be described as night terrors. Something was going on (or perhaps off is a better word) in his head, and he would pace all night long. I haven’t slept a full night, or even a couple hours straight, since it started. Each time I’d think he was finally settling down and I would get comfortable back in bed, I’d hear him up again, panting, his tags jingling softly.

Some pretty good human brains from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Schools have been working on the problem however, and things are getting better (Tito is actually sleeping peacefully as I write this – probably not for long), but I’m still behind in my work. Lack of sleep isn’t one of the better stimuli for creativity.

Another thing is my own perfectionism. Whenever I draw extinct creatures I want the viewer to feel the life that once animated them as forcefully as I do. All my life there’s been this constant battle between what I can see with my mind’s eye and what my hands can accomplish. In the next day or two, while I still won’t have the whole piece ready, I plan to post the entire process of creating one of the proboscidean drawings from scratch showing all the steps along the way.

In the meantime I’ll post this little scenic.

For over twenty years I’ve done three little images each issue for In Brief, the quarterly review journal of Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund. The cover story this issue was about the hard lessons learned from the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina. Whenever I’m given flat land to portray the sky becomes an integral and equally important part of the painting. Using the shafts of light through the layered clouds I was trying to bring both the reality of a clearing storm and the metaphorical promise of renewal into the image. After dealing with the details of anatomy, cloudscapes like this are just relaxing fun.

For a larger more detailed image click here

I know this is before the time frame of my site, but a while back I did this Tylosaurus* for Oregon Public Broadcasting. After they had used it on a program about evolution, I sent it to Mike Everhart. Mike is Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, Kansas, and the creator of the “Oceans of Kansas” website. If you’ve never stopped by this incredible site, please do so. For a great part of prehistory, what is now Kansas lay beneath a shallow sea. Mike is an expert on marine reptiles, and has gifted the curious with the best resource imaginable about these remarkable animals and their place and time in the deep past. I am simply in awe of the prodigious amount of work involved. There are hundreds of photos of exquisite fossils, and the writing is vivid and accessible to both the professional scientist and interested layperson. Mike flattered me by using the Tylosaurus as the header on of one of his articles.

And if that weren’t enough, my friend Dan Varner has his magnificent paintings of the inhabitants of this watery world on display to illustrate the vibrant and savage web of life beneath the waves.

* This painting has had a life of its own. Of all the things I’ve ever done, this is the piece for which I’ve received the most requests for use. It illustrates fossil exhibits in small museums and decorates the title page of dissertations and articles, and apparently, one roadside sign. People from 9 countries and 11 states have asked permission to use it. I had no idea.

During the late Pleistocene, lions were the most widely distributed land-mammals on earth except for man. They ranged from their present sub-Saharan homeland throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, North America and eventually South America as far as Peru.

Over half a million years ago, lions (Panthera leo) separated into two groups that subsequently had little interaction or genetic exchange. The cave lion group (Panthera leo fossilis-spelaea) entered Europe and Northern Asia and apparently remained geographically (and later perhaps behaviorally) isolated from African and Southern Asian populations. The blood of those southern animals still flows in the present-day lions of sub-Saharan Africa (P. leo subgroup – senegalensis) and a few surviving individuals (P. leo persica) in the Gir Forest of India.

For a closer look click here

American Lions (P. leo atrox) were descendents of the cave lion group. They entered North America crossing the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) during an early series of glacial advances in the Pleistocene (Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age – chart to come I promise). Like their early Eurasian cousins they were some of the largest cats to have ever lived. Males, like the animal shown here were a full 25% larger than the biggest of today’s lions. Where a big, wild male today might weigh 450 pounds, a live weight of 600 pounds or more was possible for atrox. And they had to be big and powerful. From (rather famous) remains in Alaska, we know they preyed on enormous Ice Age bison.

An unusual feature of American Lions is that they had larger brains, relative to body size, than lions anywhere else. I’m not sure just what that might indicate behaviorally, but it’s an interesting aspect of what must have been a truly awesome cat.

European cave lions have been depicted by our ancestors both in pigment and as carvings. Interestingly, no long-maned males were portrayed. There are however, marks on one of the carvings that might indicate somewhat longer hair on the neck and shoulders, and one cave painting I remember showed longer chest and belly hair. I based the mane of our animal here on those representations.

Within the genus Panthera the splits into species seem counter-intuitive to me. Apparently, new genetic work has estimated that tigers split off first about 2 million years ago, followed by the jaguar. I would have thought just looking at them and from the fact that they can still produce offspring (sometimes viable – sometimes sterile), that lion/tiger was the latest speciation. But it appears, that the leopard/lion divergence was the last, some 1.25 to 1.5 million years ago.

Drawing elephants is a lot of work, but since I don’t want to leave you for two weeks while I worry about wrinkles, I’ll put up a few of the illustrations that I’ve done for books and journals over the last few years.

Here are a couple I did for the interior of Heyday Books’ “One Day on Beetle Rock”. I showed you the cover image (a long-tailed weasel) in an early post, but there were 29 black and white illustrations inside and below are two of my favorites.

In eastern North America, Black Bears (Ursus americanus) are black. However, by the time you get reach the Rockies, brown “black” bears are common and the states and Canadian provinces that border the Pacific Ocean feature “black” bears from brown to blond to cinnamon. There are even a few special places on Canadian and Alaskan coastal islands where you can find them white or “blue”.

I’m not sure about Sequoia National Park, where Beetle Rock is located, but most of the twin cubs I’ve seen in the West were similar in coloring. Only once have I seen siblings that were as different as these two. I have to admit to doing it for the visual effect.

It should be illegal to paint a California Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis zonata) in tones of gray. Especially against a background of granite and/or pine needles these animals look extraordinary. I portrayed this one in pursuit of a Sierra Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis – subspecies taylori); at least that’s what I remember it being. At this point, 2 years later, I only know that the wonderful staff at the Beetle Rock Visitor’s Center approved it.

In Thursday’s post I mentioned that my first big Olduvai entry would be a visual history of Proboscideans in North America. In looking over what I was getting myself into, I of course discovered that there was no way I could draw and “colorize” (at least – more if you subdivide Gomphotherium at all) 15 different genera spanning 14+ million years of elephantness. Next time I review and research first, open mouth later.

There’s a whole bunch of things I know just enough about to be dangerous, but I’ve drawn lots of fossil proboscideans and I really can’t plead ignorance here. I’ve been lucky enough to get up-close and personal with both species of elephants alive today (in captivity) and I absolutely love them. I extend that love to mammoths and beyond because it seems I’m incapable of looking at extinct creatures as anything else but the living, breathing, animated marvels that they once were.

So on or about the 21st, I’ll post the proboscideans of the last couple North American Land Mammal Ages. Land Mammal Ages (LMAs from now on) are how paleontologists divide up the Cenozoic. Each has its distinctive faunal assemblages. The Rancholabrean(1) LMA began about 500,000 and ended only 10,000 years ago. It’s predecessor, the Irvingtonian(2) LMA, began about 1.9 million years ago. Both are within the Pleistocene epoch, so it’s not really going back that far, but it’s a start. We’ll worry about the earlier tuskers in the future and get around to explaining the correlations between the geologic epochs and the land mammal ages as we go. I hate it, but I’m going to have to do a chart. It’ll help keep things straight as I tend to bounce all over the place with my critters of interest.

There’s a considerable amount of wrinkled skin and hair to paint, so I’d better get busy. The post will feature all new artwork, but as a preview of sorts, here’s one of the animals to be included. This acrylic painting of Rhynchotherium (and child) is from a piece I did 6 or 7 years ago. I say from, because there was lot more background in the original image, but the animal itself was not painted much larger than you see in the linked close-up.

For a larger, more detailed image click here

Rhynchotherium (beak or snout beast) descended from earlier Gomphotheres that had entered North America in (Barstovian LMA) Miocene times (yes, definitely need a chart). Some of these animals eventually moved as far south as Central and South America, and evidence suggests that Rhynchotheres evolved there, dispersing back to the north, and lasting just long enough for me to have to include them in the coming post.

So many wrinkles…so little time.

1: The Rancholabrean LMA was named after the wonderful LaBrea site (the tar pits) in Los Angeles.

2: The Irvingtonian LMA was based on a quarried fossil site consisting of mammoths and other large grazers near Fremont, in the southeastern Bay Area of California. Highway 680 now covers it.

Last night I posted an image of a painting that has always been my favorite of the few “wall-hanging” canvases I’ve done. This illustration was the first digital image I did that I felt was the equal of my better brush and pigment work. It was the “centerfold” of the April-June 2002 issue of Bay Nature magazine (hello David and Dan) and shows the native frogs and toads of the San Francisco Bay Area.

On the left hand (water) side is the California Red-legged Frog (Rana aurora draytonii) above the Foothill Yellow-legged Frog (Rana boylii). On the right (land) side, top to bottom, there’s the Pacific Treefrog (Hyla regilla), the Western Toad (Bufo boreas), and the Spadefoot Toad (Spea hammondii). Along the bottom are shown the stages of development of the Pacific Treefrog. (The Photoshop PSD file, had 31 layers and was over 110 megabytes in size – the “flattened” single layer TIFF file on disc for the printer was still 49 megabytes)

Note: I’ve decided that the first big Olduvai post will be in 2 weeks and will feature a visual history of proboscideans in North America. I’ll start with the most recent, the mammoths and American mastodon and work my way deeper into time. It will be all new art, and since I want to do the subjects justice, it may take more than one post to go all the way back to the first gomphotheres. There, I’ve said it…now all I have to do is make it happen.

Click here for a larger, more detailed image

I’ve been told that every once in a while it would be fine to simply post an image. Some of the subtlety of the original 24-inch square canvas is lost here, but of the pieces I’ve done meant simply to hang on a wall, this was my favorite. Strange and a little sad, but because of moves and mistakes, I have no idea who owns it, or where (or even if) it’s hanging today.