How to Draw: Dinosaurs

Myshelf.com

Feb 13

Since people first started finding the bones of these long dead creatures, dinosaurs have held a fascination. Our love of monsters and fabulous beasties is well served by these animals that once trod the earth millions of years ago and with new ones being unearthed all the time this is very much a live subject. Capture these amazing creatures on paper with this helpful book. This is the latest entry in the series that shows in six stages how to create a drawing from a few shapes to the finished graphite pencil or colored drawing stage. Helpfully, each step shows the earlier lines in green with new details added in purple, ensuring that you can see what is happening at each stage and thus be inspired to have a go yourself. These pages are bare of words, but then they are not really needed as the drawings speak for themselves. There is a one page introduction, explaining the use of color and a few other things, but I for one never feel the lack of language in these books. My one beef is usually that I would prefer one more stage between #4 and #5 but this time the six stages are sufficient. Ms. Palmer has chosen a linear style that would suit a graphic novel well and the final stage merely shows it inked in and colored pencil added in whatever colors the artist wishes. This makes it possibly the best book to date in the series for total beginners, and I can imagine many children having a ball with it on a rainy afternoon. The dinosaurs are in alphabetical order, and contain many old favorites such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx as well as newcomers like Spinosaurus and Amargasaurus. There are studies of just heads, fighting stances, waving tails and even feathery bodies in a wide variety of colors, although none of them impossibly gaudy. A useful and appealing book on a subject oddly not often covered in art books that ought to appeal to anybody who has a fascination for these creatures.