Hey there! I'm a huge fan of your work and would love to get your advice.
I'm a paleoartist looking to get more serious about my art's accuracy and stuff. Do you have any advice for 1. researching for paintings and 2. getting your work noticed by paleo workers/doing reconstructions for paleontologists?
Thanks for your time!!!
Hi there!
Glad you like my work, I honestly also sometimes wonder how I got here, so this is a complicated question.
In short it's usually a mix of networking and "try to do things different from other people" that gets you noticed, but also being in the right space. Social media platforms are quite different in their audiences, not just what gets noticed but also, in this case, how many scientists there are. Tumblr for example doesn't have that many paleontologists (as far as I know).
It was the same with DeviantArt back in the day, I got my first commission 5 days after getting an account on Facebook. :P It's weird like that sometimes. When it comes to research... it depends a lot on what you wanna do. Best you can start with is usually looking at sources cited on Wikipedia, especially less obscure topics usually have pretty good sources and links to pdfs are often provided. On Google scholar you can get a much broader overview but it might need some sifting to find what you are looking for.
The Paleobiology Database, especially it's map/filter function can also be an immense help in finding information!
Beyond that it's largely a "learning by doing thing", you pick up more and more of the jargon, you learn how to filter out information that are relevant for you ect.
What can help along the ride is having friends or joining a community that is already along for the ride for a while, not just to better get access to old or paywalled papers but also because people with niche interests can help with interpreting works you struggle with. Knowledge in this community is usually shared pretty freely (unless nda) and even professional scientists often have no issue with providing information on their work. It's far from perfect, there is nitpicking and annoying discussions but personally I have learned most of what I know today through careful reading/listening/observing what more experienced members of various communities communicate about. It sped up my personal academic growth much more than going in alone.
(This isn't supposed to be a pitch for my Discord server but on Paleostream we try to curate such an environment and especially the Friday streams are geared towards helping young paleoartists.)
