Salaric

I haven’t blogged on here for a while but do not fear this has been due to being too productive rather than being unproductive and I shall go and fill in the archive when I get a moment!

Also I know the posts normally arrive on a Sunday but I have found this excellent artist collective called ART Evolved and I even managed to submit something to their last time capsule!

I am now taking part in ‘live-blogging’ the process of producing my piece for the next time capsule and as I have only a week to get this thing drawn I can taste the pressure. The challenge is to create a piece of work based on the therizinosaur dinosaurs and as the Royal School of Mines changed their teaching policy for the last year of my degree I never got to do vertebrate palaeontology – something I was deeply disappointed about (I even tried to change to the four year course because of it but it was too late) – anyway this means that I hadn’t even heard of these creatures!

It seems odd to me now as dinosaurs were on of the reasons I’d gone off to do geology in the first place! And My four year old has just done dinosaurs at school. Of course being me I probably have heard of them and have just forgotten!

My first port of call was to look in the vertebrate palaeontology book I have (I bought the text book before I found out they’d fiddled with the course and used to read it in Hyde Park when bored – yes I know but I am a geek). This had barely a page and only one scematic of a skeleton and a bit of history. Not really enough to go on.

I did some internet research last night and felt abit over whelmed by how I was going to construct this creature that seems to have kept shifting it’s place in the world of Palaeo. I sort of like to have a premise for my drawings, i.e. creating a world or a message or during my degree diagrams – I loved doing diagrams 🙂

But I didn’t really want to paint a landscape for this creature – I wanted to do something a bit more akin to a diagram but not! (yeah I know probably not making much sense here!)

I was also pondering which one of the ‘possible’ therizinosaur dinosaurs depictions should I go for?

Then an idea occured to me – why not do a sort of time line of the evolution of the concept of these dinos? Of course this seems like a huge task and I probably will not get that finished for the deadline for the time capsule but I should think that in working towards it I will produce something I can submit 🙂

I am actually very excited about this as I love fusing science and art 🙂