c. 2023
Art Director: Sean McCabe
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Lost World novels are beloved by many fans of the Jurassic Park franchise, myself included. However, rarely do we ever see artistic depictions of the sequences in the books. Sure, the movies have adapted a handful of scenes, but even then liberties are taken. So for this project, I wanted to create a series of illustrations depicting key scenes from both novels and render them as accurately as the books describe. This project allowed me to play to my strengths and get stuck into the finer details.
Research:
I have read both novels fairly recently. I have also seen the movies too many times in my life, so certain scenes that I read in the book felt familiar as they were adaptations of sequences in the films. The biggest challenge was changing the appearance of the dinosaurs. I knew I didn't want the dinosaurs to look like how they do in the movies, so I decided to take a more scientifically accurate approach with most of them. This usually comes down to wrist placement, adding more flesh to the body of the animal, adding feathers, and having more colorful novel-accurate pigmentation.
Process:
Before getting stuck in all the specifics of each drawing, I experimented with the compositions. It was great to not only render the intricate details of the dinosaurs' scales and the foliage of the jungle but also to fill in all the heavy shadows. For each illustration, I started with several thumbnail sketches, and when I found a composition that I was satisfied with, I made a larger rough sketch for each one. When I was satisfied with those, then I moved on to making the final/tight sketches for each illustration. After that, it was a matter of hand-inking each piece and lastly coloring them digitally. Additional shading and highlights were done last to complete the illustrations.
