The Portrait Series

I have the Dinosaur Toy Blog to thank for a great many things.  Since joining its official forum about a year and a half ago, the latter has been instrumental in rekindling my dormant passion for dinosaurs and prehistoric life, has prompted me to resume drawing saurians in earnest once more after many years, and has led me to this corner of cyberspace inhabited by the palaeo-community, eventually leading to the creation of this nonsense of a blog. 

I have also made a number of friends there, some of whom have become dearer than ever to me, which perhaps was the very best thing of all.  

This ongoing (though highly intermittent) portrait series was the result of my having begun a thread asking the members to declare 'What dinosaur are you?' 

And of course, I then began drawing some of them.

There is no mystery at all as to which dinosaur the member 'MightyJPTrex' sees himself as.  The presence of Andrew Carnegie next to him is an indication of his place of employment.  The money bags are my own tongue-in-cheek reference to his collection of the very finest high-end dinosaur models and collectibles.  He and Carnegie are being photographed by forum moderator and official blog author, 'Boki', whose highly distinctive and professional photographs furnish many a forum thread and continually draw compliments from its members.  He is, of course, an Amargasaurus.

Christopher DiPiazza, or 'Griffin', another official Dino Toy Blog author and guest author of Jersey Boy Hunts Dinos, is a Triceratops, accompanied here by his pet Yorkshire Terrier, Zeus, together with Luisa the salmon-crested cockatoo and Aurora and Oliver the Eurasian eagle owls; just a few of the animals with whom he works.  Chris is also a brilliant artist. 

(A small note on the hands; the claws on the two smaller digits were errors which I had yet to learn of at the time of drawing this, which was over a year ago.)

I daresay the readers of this blog must be no stranger to my good friend Marc Vincent, co-author of Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs (and yet another Dino Toy Blog author).  It is thanks to his and David Orr's kindness that my saurian offerings have received notice from those who may not otherwise have stumbled upon them.  Marc is a Deinonychus and this portrait was his birthday card from 2010.  He is also particularly fond of magpies.

This Diplodocus is none other than yours truly.  A self-mortifying, tea-drinking, book-loving dimwit of a sauropod.

And this is what happened when the last three subjects had the good fortune to convene one day.  Chris visited London on vacation holiday in May, 2011, and Marc and I met up with him at London's Natural History Museum.  It should be noted that none of us are properly in scale here for several artistic reasons, not least because Marc would have had to be drawn very tiny indeed.  I have grown increasingly discontented with this illustration (with my execution of it, not with the subject matter), and am rather hoping to re-draw this scene one day.

Finally, for now...

This 'Moulin Rex' Trio are not portraits of anyone in particular, but was a cheeky rebuttal to the thread's increasing number of members claiming to be T.rex.  Marc had suggested their being drawn in tutus by means of 'bringing them down a peg or two'.  I was only too happy to oblige.