How to dino

a) Triceratops trial.

I thought I'd share my process for the geometric dinosaurs I've been playing with this last year. It's quite straightforward if you follow some basic rules:

1. No curves
2. No partial terminations.
3. Triangles must orientate with the direction of texture flow

More ideas below the cut

Geometric dinosaur tri-al

I've been neck deep in block printing experiments this last 9 months so please tolerate the upcoming flood of enthusiastic posts.

Spotlight has now started stocking speedball ink and a variety of supplies and ArtRiot had a buy $40, get $40 sale so I now have a goodly stockpile of various things to experiment with. First up is the Speedball Screen Printing Ink. This is sold in a four pack of black, red, blue and yellow at Spotlight for reasonable prices. I also bought white because I like the idea of white block printing then overdying with indigo sometime in the near future.

To test the ink I hand painted another geometric dinosaur. The paint is designed to be pushed through a screen print frame. As a result, it's quite sticky and will need thinning before being used in block printing.

If at first you don't succeed, tri, tri again.

The tricerotops on the left was painted with a flat bruch while the one on the right used a tapered round. The paint was easier to load on the tapered round and i didn't need to go over the lines as much. As a result, the lines are less fluffy. I like the frill on the one on the right, it's a much cleaner head and I'm alot happier with it.

En-raptored with geometrics

An experiment with hand painting geometric dinosaurs. I'm not 100% happy with the feet but the idea is sound and I'd like to apply it to a variety of other dino's.

The pale yellow halo is actually talc powder which I've used to transfer the outline of my design onto a black polo shirt. The method works really well but has the possibility of gumming up the paintbrush if too much powder is free to move. It brushes off easily once the paint is ironed though.

Shield of hotness

 

 St George and the Dragon, by Paolo Uccello, 1470. (wikipaintings here)

I've been using a smaller shield for at least 6 months now. For a long time it's been creamy white canvass covered in black and blue streaks from where I block blows. I finally decided to paint it over the Christmas break. I was sort of planning on just putting my heraldry on it again as it worked really well last time and looks great in a shield wall. Then I found a photo of St George (above) while looking for images of Wyvyrns. I love this painting because the lady is so clearly out walking her pet dragon on a leash when the oafish St George comes along and spears it through the eye. I couldn't resist, so I painted the key features on my shield. I'm rather happy with how it turned out even though I can't do faces or hands. I also used pearl white instead of pure white as they didn't have any at the store. This leaves a shimmer in the sky, on the faces and hands of the lady and georg(ina) and a very shiny horse.

This is not a very good picture of the shield but the main details are there. I've tried to retain the foreshortening that the original painter used in the dragon and the horse but I'm not so good at that. I also changed the dragon a little. I moved his leg and changed his stance so I could change his claws... if you notice he looks alot more like the figures below.Yep, I changed him to a velociraptor. Before you ask, Yes, I know they're only giant chicken sized (or small ostrich), and we've got fossil evidence to show they had feathers. I like the dragon wings better so I've compromised and given him small bat hands near the ends of his wings. I'm very happy with this shield! AND I entered it into the College of St Monicas, Twilight Tourney Heraldry competition and came first! Yay!