Illustrating Bones

["Jerry D. Harris" <102354.2222@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by INTERNET:tlford@ix.netcom.com
>Not really. I've mastered it in a short time, and if you haven't seen
Jerry Harris's Acrocanthosaurus monograph, you should. He did a great
job and he says he's not an artist.<

        I'm not!  At least, in my own definition:  an artist is someone who
can sit down and draw, _freehnad_, anything he/she wants to, which I am
flatly unable to do (unless you're into semi-cartoonish stick figures... 
;-D  )  Oddly enough, my thesis _cum_ bulletin is the _very_ first time
I've ever attempted a scientific illustration!  I did the drawings by
taking good color slides of each bone, projecting the slide on a piece of
smooth posterboard on the wall, putting a piece of tracing paper over the
projection, then sitting in a semi-darkened room with the specimen in one
hand (or on a cart for the larger bones) and then starting to stipple -- 05
width pen for the outlines and 03 for the stipples.  I did the skull
element diagrams first, and if you examine them carefully in the bulletin,
you can see subtle differences between how I did them and the later,
particularly vertebral, drawings as my techniques became more refined. 
(Actually, now that I'm all done with them, I've been thinking how to make
things like that even better...possibly I'll use finer-tipped pens...) 
Like Tracy, I drew them fairly large, and then shrank them by scanning them
into my computer and using both the scanning and a graphics program to
further manipulate them.  I tried to predict where intensely-stippled area
would condense into unreadable black smudges upon shrinking, and I caught
all but one of them (which I undid on a pixel-by-pixel basis on the
computer -- it's Fig. 18D, if anyone's interested.

        I've seen a lot of excellent published illustrations that, instead
of using stipples to imply depth and curvature, use a series of parallel
lines (Bakker prefers this method, for example).  I don't have a steady
enough hand for that, and less of an understanding of how its done than
stippling, which (a) seemed more logical to me at first, and (b) was the
only method I'd actually witnessed being produced previously...but still,
I'd love to try it sometime!  However, most of all, I would love to learn
how to produce those peculiar kinds of "smudged-pencil" shading drawing
like some of those that have appeared in Sereno's papers lately -- witness
those illustrating the skull of _Herrerasaurus_ in his paper on that
animal!  I have no idea how those are done.  I also truly adore the
pictures in Ostrom & McIntosh's _Marsh's Dinosaurs_, but again, I am
unaware of how those were done.

        As a caveat, I must say that while I suspected that illustrating
dozens of specimens for my thesis would take a long time, it took a _lot_
longer than I'd thought it would!  Stippling is, although not terribly
hard, more difficult than it looks, and a _lot_ more time consuming!  Well,
at least in the large, pre-shrunk ones I did it was, particularly when
there were lots of deep areas that required heavy stipple.  However, in
comparison to many other stippled illustrations I've seen, I seem to have
used much more stipple than other illustrators generally do.  In some
cases, I think I produced more detail, which I like, but in others, I think
it looks smudgy.  I am, of course, still learning!


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Jerry D. Harris                         (505) 841-2865
Fossil Preparation Lab                
New Mexico Museum of Natural History        
1801 Mountain Rd NW                           
Albuquerque  NM  87104-1375             102354.2222@compuserve.com