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Determining an Illustration Style

In reviving the dinosaur drawing book one of the biggest questions weighing on me was the illustration style of the final step. I reserved the entire month of January to explore this and experiment by illustrating some of the final images. Now that I’ve completed three (Giraffititan, Hadrosaurus, and Allosaurus) I thought I’d write about the process.

The 2004 Illustration Style

In the book’s first incarnation the final illustration was only black line art with some light blue fills to represent some kind of marking pattern.

I did this for a few reasons. First, with all the steps together on a single two-page-spread, I didn’t want the final image to overpower everything else. Second, I was concerned doing this would cause the users to mentally lock themselves into my color schemes and prevent them from experimenting with their own. Lastly, I wasn’t sure if my skills at the time would produce something acceptable. Straight color fills with no extra illustration of depth or shadow would look too cartoony, a problem I thought I already had with just the line art alone.

Creating a Requirements List

Returning to the project I realized the first concern isn’t a problem anymore with an interactive version since only one step is visible at a time. The third point I’ve changed my mind on. Kids mentally associating with my palettes isn’t necessarily a bad thing if I think I have good palettes and a “cooler” final illustration could attract more kids to want to try drawing in the first place. The last question mark, point two regarding my skills, would need to be answered during the process.

I spent some time creating a requirements list for the final illustration in the new format.

1. Dinosaur must be able to stand alone on just the black line art. All my dinosaurs as a kid had pencil outlines so taking the dark lines off the final illustration would be unfair to many of the users.

2. Entire dinosaur set should have a wide variety of colors and patterns users could conceivably mix and match (draw an Allosaurus but use the Dilophosaurus patterns).

3. Dinosaurs should be interesting enough to spark excitement and creativity while remaining accurate and without sensationalism.

4. Final style should not be so complex it comes off as intimidating and risks turning off kids from wanting to draw in the first place. This happened to me with a number of drawing books as a kid and even into my twenties. I’d look at the final drawing and think “Jeeze, I can’t do that” and be discouraged right up front.

5. When viewed on the family tree together feature changes from one dinosaur along similar branches should be logical.

This last point is a little unique because of how I’m going to do my table of contents. The opening screen of the app will be all the dinosaurs placed on a browsable family tree, similar to the opening table of contents from the original book. In this section below, if my Deinonychus has bird-like feathers and Allosaurus only has a fuzzy coating of feathers then T-Rex shouldn’t have bird-like feathers unless I’m insinuating that these kinds of feathers appeared on their own a second time in a parallel branch.

Illustration Process

For each dinosaur in 2004 I made a vector skeleton frame in Adobe Illustrator to play with and assure proper scale. For Giraffititan this is the skeleton frame. Inside Illustrator I can play with this with different poses until I find something I liked.

Using this frame next I drew the black line art, remembering that the dinosaur must be able to stand alone just in this mode.

This probably seems pretty obvious but for some dinosaurs, especially the therapods with feathers or hair-like coatings this became more complicated. Hair of different levels of shagginess, thickness, and texture can be drawn different ways to show that with just lines. To help me with this I heavily studied some of the character designs in The Jungle Book. Below I put together in order some of the characters going from least to most shaggy.

Bagahera the Panther is hairy but his coat is smooth so there is almost no texture. Sher Khan is the same way except for his face, which starts to show some jaggedness. Baloo’s body starts to show some texture with extra definition at joints and sharp curves. King Louie is a mix of shagginess all over his body with his arms having very long and loose hair and relatively little on his belly. The vultures are the most erratic in the wings, which sometimes show actual feathers and sometimes generalize them.

I needed to include at least one of these dinosaurs for the experimentation period and chose Allosaurus. Here is the final line drawing.

Some places like the head, chest, and tail are shaggy, some show just a little texture, and for along the body where I wanted it to look like the hair kind of just thinned out there are just scattered line bits.

Next for each I did flat fills to work out the color palettes and figure out what kind of markings I wanted. Again I looked at The Jungle Book. The movie takes place in the jungle but the character colors are relatively muted. In The Lion King for instance the colors are bright and saturated but they’re a little more natural in Jungle Book, which I liked.

Giraffititan I kind of based on hippopotamus colors.

Hadrosaurus I made purple to assure some variety (also for some reason I’ve always like to do Hadrosaurus in purple).

For Allosaurus I did a mixture of brown furry patterns with some bright bird-like markings on the skin.

Then I went through about a week of trial and error trying to figure out how to do shadows, highlights, and textures in photoshop. Not everything I tried worked. Any kind of skin texture I tried failed, I think because it attempted to do a level of detail in color that was more refined than what the dark outlines showed. I could also do no bounce light. Bounce light is a strip of line along a shadow that represents light bouncing off a different surface and hitting the subject from a different angle. The bright strip sandwiched in between the dark line and the shadow felt too out of place.

Giraffititan turned out relatively well, but he was a little easy to start with. Since he’s so large he’s at a much different scale than the other animals so it was easy to get away with no texture and little detail.

Hadrosaurus I have mixed feelings about. He feels a little too shiny and blurred like he’s plastic. That came from a change in technique I discontinued afterwards. I might do a little more work on him later.

Allosaurus...I think I like the Allosaurus.

Since I last made color dinosaurs (2000) so much has changed, such as the hair-like coats of feathers. Some people now suspect they were brightly colored like modern birds, which I’ve decided to try as well.

This has been tough to wrap my head around. You grow up with this picture in your head about what a dinosaur looks like. It gradually evolves with new information, like when they stopped dragging their tails. Mostly they're easy to adjust to but this is a pretty radical change relatively quickly.

After reflecting I feel comfortable this style will meet the above requirements: interesting but not sensational, a good variety of colors and patterns, and can stand alone with just lines. Someone commented they look a little “Disney”, which I was a little disappointed to hear even though it’s understandable because of the Jungle Book influence, but they’re also drawings, so I’m not worried about that.

Ok, back to programming!