Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Let’s build a Struthiomimus Flock

Since most people are fighting the coronavirus pandemic by isolating at home, I decided to create an art project that yall can build using stuff a lot of people have around the house.

What I came up with was a pattern to build a life sized Struthiomimus skull puppet, based on an actual Struthiomimus skull cast from Triebold Paleontology, that you can put together with small cardboard box, some glue and/or tape and a pair of scissors.

Struthiomimus Skull Puppet Lateral

You can download the pdf by clicking HERE (or by clicking the pattern image below this)

Struthio page sample

Here are a few shots of the finished puppet project for you to reference. I’m working on an instructional video which I’ll post here as soon as it’s done.

StruthioNoggin Frontish top

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The SummonENGH 2018 PALEOART CONTEST

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YOU HAVE BEEN SUMMONED TO RESSURECT ANCIENT CREATURES THROUGH ART AND SCIENCE!

I am excited to announce that I won the Lanzendorf National Geographic Paleoart Prize for 2D illustration this year, but there really aren’t very many competitions for paleoart so I’ve decided to pay it forward and host my own!

INTRODUCING THE SummonEngh 2018 PALEOART CONTEST/BATTLE

This contest is made possible by the generous support of my followers on http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself.

Here are the OFFICIAL CONTEST RULES!!
-Up to 3 entries per person
-Entries must be by art made by a single (1) person (NOT a production house, museum staff, exhibit company, studio etc.)
-Entries can be any media, 2d illustration, 3d sculpture, animation, dioramas, shadow puppets, interpretive dance etc etc etc (surprise me)
-Entries must be submitted by email with name, contact info (ideally including social media links) to TheSummonEngh2018 at gmail . com. Entrants are welcome to submit a short written statement for each piece (300 words or less) explaining it. They may also include links to scientific papers or other research and/or images or videos of their process.
-Additionally I will be creating an open facebook group page for the contest and entrants are encouraged to post art and in-progress pictures to social media with the hashtag #TheSummonEngh2018
-Contest opens October 1, closes November 1st at 12:01 am pacific standard time.

-The winner will be announced on November 9th (#FossilFriday). -The winner will receive a one-time cash prize of 50% of my donations on http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself collected at the beginning of November (minus paypal fees). The winner will be contacted shortly after patreon donations have processed and the cash prize will be paid out via check or paypal payment in a lump sum.

Due to paypal taking fees the final cash prize will be a little less than half of what you see listed on my patreon page at the end of the month of October. I will however show the winner the exact amounts as screen grabs from patreon & paypal once the payments are all processed so you know why the final prize amount is what it is.

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Entries will be judged according to the following criteria by me (Brian Engh):
-Creativity and originality. Entrants are encouraged to explore new hypotheses, present new aesthetics, and generally NOT continue the tradition of unoriginality and copycatting that is so common in paleoart.
-Detail, story and mood. By detail I don’t necessarily mean photo realism or minute intricacies of texture (though that can be nice too), I’m more interested in whether or not the piece has enough going on in it that it makes the viewer want to look at in it more than once. If there’s a sense of life history, story, or mood that gets me every time!
-Scientific plausibility. I am not interested in what the internet consensus is on the most “likely” or “conservative” view is on the science of a given organism. Very often my experience working with experts in the field is that paleoart is significantly behind the latest science on both prehistoric organisms and living ones. Artists are encouraged to seek out and illustrate new hypotheses in the world of paleontology and incorporate the most up to date research on the anatomy, behavior and ecology of living systems. I believe that if significant and broad reaching research is used to fill in the gaps missing from the fossil record it will be apparent in the art.

Miscellaneous things I feel I need to say at the outset of this contest:
-I reserve the right to extend the contest or the payout time as necessary for whatever unforeseen logistical or technical issues, emergencies etc, or just because I want to.
-I reserve the right to ban/block/ignore and/or physically fight trolls, blatant plagiarists or anyone being generally rude & douchey. I expect and hope that there will be some discourse about paleoart generated by this contest, but please please please keep it civil.
-Artists, please be prepared in advance for people critiquing your work publicly once it is posted. This is part of being an artist, especially one whose work is based on science which is built on debate and independent analysis of data. Artists are definitely encouraged to show the research and sketching that went into a piece in advance of or in response to criticism. Artists are also encouraged to bear in mind that sometimes what people write in text format sounds ruder than how they would sound if they were talking to you face to face. Be chill homies, be chill.
-I reserve the right to end the contest for any reason, including but not limited to people being jerks online, so please keep it civil and respectful.
-Have fun!!!!

I look forward to seeing all kinds of amazing paleoart from all of you, and please don’t forget to holla at me on Twitter & Facebook!

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2017 Year In Review

I got a lot of stuff done in 2017, but my work is all over the place, so I thought I’d collect up the significant finished pieces and amass them here for the convenience of anyone interested. Many of these pieces were made possibile in part (if not in large part) by my patreon supporters. If you’d like to help make 2018 even more productive than 2017 consider making a small monthly donation through my Patreon page.
While most of the year was taken up grinding away on several big ambitious pieces, the year ended with a flurry of new commissions being started, and one really unique one being finished on a quick turnaround. The image below is an illustration depicting the interesection of Wilshire and La Brea in Los Angeles, as it might have looked about 15 thousand years ago.

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The two mammoths depicted are based on skeletons found 15 feet below the current street level while excavating the terminal for a new Metro system in Los Angeles. The piece was conceived commissioned by Sherri Gust, CEO of Cogstone Incorporated, a leading paleontological and archaeological mitigation company based in California, for her company’s holiday card. Because the piece came to me on short notice, I had to act fast, and the entire project went from discussion with paleontologists Sherri Gust, Eric Scott and Ashley Leger, shooting reference of the fossils excavated, to finished rendering in about 2 weeks.

Most of my projects in 2016 were not such quick turnarounds, as this year saw the creation of my two largest paleoart pieces to date. Most recently completed was a 2 foot by 8 foot drawing of the Kayenta Formation paleoenvironment for the Saint George Dinosaur Discovery Site in St. George Utah. The piece is a timeline featuring 3 complex and distinct paleoenvironments over time, with dozens of animals, hundreds of plants, and even climatic changes in the weather.

Here you can see what about an hour of my time working on this piece looks like compressed into about a minute of drawing timelapse:

But this piece is far from finished, as it still needs to be digitally colored, printed, and incorporated into a new exhibit to be installed at the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site. So, for the time being, the full scan of the grayscale drawing can only be seen by my Patreon supporters.

In addition to attacking big paleoart projects the long overdue final Earth Beasts Awaken video resumed production, and numerous shots for a key sequence are now in the bag.

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I don’t want to give too much away, but an overview of the progress made so far, as well as a few other behind the scenes updates on Earth Beasts Awaken pt 3 can be found on my patreon.

The other major piece I took on in 2017 was a life sized mural depicting two fighting mastodons for the Western Science Center in Hemet California. This was my first piece to be printed and displayed at full scale, and it was my first piece depicting probiscidians. Naturally there was a steep learning curve when taking on both of these new challenges, and again, I documented my progress on patreon and posted an overview here.

MeWithMyBoyz

Between the mastodon mural and rendering the Kayenta timeline I was busy with traveling to paleo conferences, meeting with researchers and museums to initiate projects and doing field work. My biggest journey was a huge road trip from southern California to Calgary Canada to attend the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting. I convoyed up to the great north with paleontologists Andrew Milner, Dr. Jim Kirkland and Don DeBlieux, and had numerous adventures along the way and while there. While in Canada I collaborated with paleontologists Brian Gee and Yara Haridy on a quick reconstruction of some strange permian monsters with especially strange dentition, which you can read more about in my post Nightmare Mouths of the Permian.

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While the initial paper the art was published on focused on the predator – Cacops – we included an easter egg in that the prey featured was Yara’s study species Opisthodontosaurus carrolli, which she has since defended her master’s thesis on. A paper about its dentition can be found HERE. CaptoButt2

On the way back from Canada I stopped in Utah to assist paleontologists Andrew Milner, Rob Gay and Jessica Uglesich in the excavation of a significant Triassic bone bed right on the border of the Bears Ears National Monument. Despite being under staffed, under-funded and short on time, we managed to extract several huge chunks of stone packed with skeletal material including several significant discoveries and most of a new species just before President Trump downsized several Utah monuments in what amounts to little more than a land grab for the fossil fuel industry and a gesture of disrespect to the previous administration which established the monument. Here you can see a video of us excavating the massive fossil filled jackets:

In the background I’ve stayed active making new music, and I released a secret playlist of tracks in the works for my Patreon supporters.
I also put out a little video showing my music making progress, as requested by patreon supporters.

I also managed to complete several other videos for my paleoart youtube channel, which I’ve amassed for your viewing pleasure here:

Also announced in 2017 was that a new ornithomimid – soon to be officially named by ReBecca Hunt-Foster – is the new state fossil of Arkansas. One of several pieces of art commissioned by ReBecca went out with the State of Arkansas press release. More on this creature later…

ArkansScaleWeb

And finally here’s a floofy family of raptors squishing through the mud of the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite that I illustrated for a short film on the Moab area, coming soon to the Moab Information Center. I now have 6 pieces of art on interpretive panels and signage at four public fossil sites in the Moab area, and I will soon be completing more. Hopefully in the coming year I’ll find the time to put together a video tour of these fossil sites I’ve had the good fortune to be able to create paleoart for, thanks to the hard work and support of ReBecca Hunt-Foster.

RaptorFamWeb

Again I’d like to thank my patreon supporters for their generous support throughout the year. Many of these projects would not have been possible without their support, and I am deeply honored to receive their feedback and encouragement in addition to their financial commitment to helping me make my art. Words cannot convey my gratitude, so I will thus strive to convey my thanks by making 2018 even more productive and creative than years before. Stay tuned. Lots of exciting new projects are already in the works.
BebeRaptorCloseup

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Kayenta Timeline Work In Progress

I recently finished this big drawing of the Kayenta formation, which is both a multi-environment paleoecological reconstruction and a timeline/strategraphic column. As you move through the timeline you step up through the layers of stone preserved in the rocks around St. George Utah, and every scene is based on specific fossil sites discovered and studied by paleontologist Andrew Milner and his crew. The finished full color piece will be incorporated into a museum exhibit at the Saint George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm – an awesome paleo museum in Saint George Utah.

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If you don’t follow me on twitter or facebook you should be because I’ve been posting more regular updates on there, and if you’re a supporter on Patreon I recently uploaded a scan of the now finished grayscale drawing so that my supporters can see the ambitious art that they’re helping to make possible.

But this is only phase one. As is my typical process this huge drawing will be colored digitally to bring it to life and I will continue to post updates as I do.

Stay tuned, and thanks for the support.

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Valley of the Mastodons exhibit now open

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Just last week the Valley of The Mastodons exhibit at the Western Science Center in Hemet CA opened, and it features my first paleoart mural. The mural depicts 2 full sized male Mastodons battling, and the older male on the right is based on the fossils of a Mastodon at the museum named “Max” who has several injuries to the right side of his jaw that are consistent with tusk strikes. The exhibit features more Mastodon fossil material on display than any Mstodon exhibit in the history of Mastodon exhibits and if you’re in southern California between now and early 2018 you should definitely check it out. After the Valley of the Mastodon exhibit closes, my mural will still be on display in the main gallery of the museum, right behind Max’s mounted skeleton.

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I shot a bunch of reference footage and footage of me drawing/painting this mural which I plan on editing together as a video for my paleoart youtube page as soon as I can find the time.

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As always, supporting my art on Patreon enables me to do the best job I can on projects like this and also makes doing behind the scenes posts and videos possible, so consider kicking me a few bucks on there if you can spare it and want to help me make the best art I possibly can. As a thank you to my patrons 9″x18″ poster prints of this piece are now available to my top-tier supporters or any supporters who have had my back for a while and haven’t requested a free print from me recently. Thanks yall.

DGV2E-iVYAATeAm

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New Paleoart Youtube Page

In order to grow the audience and confuse Youtube’s algorithms less I have created a new youtube page specifically for paloeart, natural history and wildlife videos. Basically I just realized I have a TON of footage on my hard drives that I’ve shot of various plants and animals and environments which I frequently reference or draw inspiration from for paleoart and other projects. So I figured I’d put it to use to help communicate the science that went into my various paleoart pieces as well as promote my art etc. Here are the first two videos in what I intend on making a fairly regular thing. I hope you’ll subscribe to the page: http://www.youtube.com/DinosaursReanimated

These videos were made possible by support from my Patreon supporters. You can find my patreon page (stocked with a lot of top secret stuff you can’t see anywhere else) here:
http://www.patreon.com/historianhimself

Thanks for the support yall. Let me know what you think.

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Paleoart timelapses

I’m working on some art for some more interpretive trail signage in Utah commissioned by Rebecca Hunt-Foster and I’ve been shooting time lapses of the process for my patreon page.

If you enjoy my work and aren’t already supporting me on patreon, I hope you’ll consider it. For only $1 a month you get access to a raft of behind the scenes content, exclusive downloads and first looks, and I’ll be adding more in the coming months.

Big thanks to those of you who do support my art. Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think about the bonus conent I’ve been posting & if there’s anything else you’d like to see!!

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Gather Bones album teaser

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Earth Beast Suit Test

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@GreyGriffon

In an effort to get my latest work and updates to people more easily I have created a twitter account and facebook page for the historian himself. While this website (dontmesswithdinosaurs) will remain the main source and archive for content, the facebook page and twitter feeds will be updated with links to new work here as well as updates and news on upcoming projects and events so that humans who regularly check their facebook and twitter can stay in touch and up to date more easily.

Stay in touch.

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