Alright! After a week or so of trying some different things out, it’s time to get back to dinosaurs. After sketching out some initial ideas, and taking the time to render the dinosaur in a way I’m happy with, it was time to put him into an environment.

In a video titled The Biggest Mistake Beginning Illustrators and Animators Make, Will Terry (can you guess who I’ve been watching lately?) mentions the importance of being able to put characters into a scene or environment. Employers, clients etc. are not only looking for interesting characters, but for them to be acting within a world.

So, knowing this now, I decided to create an environment for the dinosaur I drew earlier.

A cup of coffee is ready to keep me going! As I have done previously, I printed out the line-work from the previous piece so I could draw on it by hand first. I prefer working with a physical pen if I have the option.

Here you can see the line-work scanned into my computer. Some of it will change a bit a little further down. I tried to carry the contour lines found in the dinosaur into the rest of the image.

I was having some trouble figuring out the colours. I wanted to have the stones ‘sit’ on the the surface of the paper, and I also didn’t want them to take too much focus away from the dinosaur himself.

Here I am starting to find something that I’m happy with. The cooler blue helps to remove some of the focus off the rocks. Because I want this image to appear to have a foreground, middle-ground, and background, there are a couple things I tried to do to create some depth.

I thinned out the line weight on some of the rocks in the image above. On the left you can see thick black outlines around the rocks in the middle. On the right I trimmed those lines down, and faded the black out a bit to push them back into the page. By having the most saturated blue in the foreground, and moving into progressively paler blues as the image moves back, hopefully I was able to start to create a bit of depth. I tried to make the mountains in the very back quite pale, and removed the outline from them completely to hopefully show they are way back in the image.

So here it is so far, not quite complete. I have a lot of work to do in terms of composition! This picture, while a good exercise, isn’t really as engaging as I think it could be. The dinosaur is just standing there, plopped in the middle of a rocky land.

I have some more work to do on this image, namely all the rocks in the middle-ground and background. They could really use some shadows to put them on the ground so they don’t appear to float as much. I’m trying to decide how to approach the contour stripes on the middle rocks. Any ideas?