Paleoemporia

This is a piece I started on before the Holidays and just "finished" up this evening. He is a hunter from the upper paleolithic Levant. This is the second iteration of this guy as I screwed up his predecessor and had to scrap it. I'm much happier with the finished product here. What I have been exploring in my sketing and here in this finished wash is developing visual culture for paleolithic peoples where no archaeological visability exists. There is a considerable amount of freedom in this, however I do impose some rules on myself when fleshing these guys out. Namely, there has to be precedent to what I am doing, in that, there has to be some paleoanthropological clues from specific locations/times to serve as a starting point to my imaginings, some clues in the science as to how things may have looked, felt, whatever, 40+ thousand years ago.

This is a new graphite drawing I have been working on. A few things yet to clean up but all and all am pretty happy with how it turned out. The subject(s) are the species Bison Latifrons (Giant or Ice Age Bison) and Pathera Leo Atrox (American Lion). Both are extinct species from the North American Pleistocene (1.8 MYA - approx. 11,00 Y.A.) and were considerably larger than any related extant counterparts.

Graphite on hot press watercolor paper

24"x30"

Graphite on hot-press w/c paper

23"/30"

Above is a series of photos of a drawing I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. Having a thing for dinosaurs and all thisgs dino related since I was a kid (what kid doesn't) I had a ton of fun working on this. I used a variety of resourse material to bring the forest and creek bed together as well as a bunch of different dinosaur books and web resources to flesh out the allosaurus. I wanted to convey a sense of magnitude to the forest that is just barely on the edge of comprehension. Working with an approximate length of 30' for the allosaurus in the drawing I hope conveys a grandness to the size of the trees. I may or may not have pulled it off. What I hope this does not look like is a small dino in a normal (human sized) wood.

This is the second posting of this drawing after consulting with my brother Josh, and friend Mike, about ways in which to post larger work without the use of a scanner. The first postings were both too blurry and profoundly yellowed out due to shooting pics of the drawing indoors without the aid of any kind of tech. equiptment designed for the job. These photos were shot outside my house in Nampa on an overcast day, mid January.

New Beginnings.

This blog is being started at the suggestion of a good friend over at Three Red Head Studios (check it out, http://www.threeredheadstudios.com/ ) for the purpose of maintaining drive, promoting growth, and developing clarity of vision in my resumed attempts of doing art work. See, I have been something of an irresponsible and ungrateful son and student of me dear old Dad for the last decade or more (more), having failed to take what he imparted to me in the way of training and opportunity, cultivation of what talent I might have had, and further developing the products of his relentless task mastery (just joking, Pop).

Anyway, its been fun working.
G.