Assigment 4 - Magazine Illustration - 1st thoughts

In this Assignment we were asked to create an illustration based on a still life for a magazine. The topics I was most interested in were Discovery and Lost.

I began with Spider grams for both...

The idea of fossils and a child's discovery appealed for 'Discovery'. My uncle has a T-Rex skull and I had taken some pictures of my son touching it, last summer, so I decided to sketch from that. I also accumulated some fossils and geologist's paraphernalia for some still life sketches.

I wanted to introduce an element of the moment of discovery... so that could either be the moment that an ammonite was opened up to reveal its intricate inside....

Or the process of washing fossils to reveal their detail..

Or the point at which a child makes and discovery about the world about them... e.g. feeling the teeth of a t-rex and that discovery triggering the imagination.

At this stage I was drawn to doing a painting in acrylics and making the T-Rex appear animated in places to reinforce the feeling of discovery - perhaps with lizard like eyes flashing from inside the head.