Dinosaurs

I executed a lot of dinosaurs while I was at Jack Nightingale Artworks. Most of them in collaboration with the other illustrator there who I'll call Rico out of respect for his privacy. Rico was a good artist and we we're buds for most of the time we worked together. We both worked on the dinos, passing them back and forth in an effort to make them better and better. 

Quite often we'd base our dinosaurs on reference from Jacks extensive morgue files and later on we'd use images from good ol' Google. Unlike animal illustrations that you can find photo reference for, dino photos we're not available. There we're no cameras back when they ruled the earth.

Rico did the preliminary sketch for these dinos and I did all the rendering. Every year we'd have to try and top the last. We'd add features like scales that were printed in puff ink or we'd do special glow in the dark plates. 

These guys pictured here we're done near the end of the dino days at Jack's. The new technique that was added to them was the reflected highlights. White on one side and taupe on the other in this case.

Doing dinos every year was fun for a while. I must say though that the printing of our designs often fell way short of the comps we produced. The reps that worked the dino account would often make "creative" contributions to the designs before the actually got printed. The additions or subtractions could be nightmarishly bad. 

Another case of non artists expressing themselves at the expense of the artwork and the final product. I cannot say I miss viewing some of the train wreck tees produced from our painstaking renderings.

As a side note, these illustrations are copyrighted by Jack Nightingale Artworks and I show them strictly for review and portfolio purposes. BTW Jack didn't draw any dinos. He had a pretty good gig for many years adding type and background squiggles to the designs while taking credit and getting paid for the entire enterprise. Rico and I got a paycheck. 

Hopefully, Jack is still receiving income from these dinos as I have seen reworked versions used on items like swim trunks and tees as recently as last year.