The Shop Of Things

This isn't my day job, but one day I'd like to be. That means making a bit more from this so that I can afford to spend a bit less time day-jobbing. You get the point.

Since Pteroformer went live at the end of 2014, I've added several new pieces to my Redbubble page which provide an important mid-month injection of funds. But I wanted to take things a step further by combining my illustrating with my writing, so this June I published a 118-page compilation of palaeoart, A Disarray Of Palaeoart, which is available through the print-on-demand service, Lulu. (Not my first book, but it is my first for palaeoart.)

Illustrations from A Disarray Of Palaeoart: A fish collides with a pliosaur; Velociraptor gets booted down a hill; an ichthyosaur gives birth to a plesiosaur (okay, that didn't ever happen); a sauropod goes Monty Python; a pterosaur doing nothing.)

Disarray is a collection of illustrations produced for 2017's Inktober and DrawDinovember and presents them in order of their production. Each image is paired with text, ranging from insight into the palaeontology behind the goings on in the images, to nonsense poetry and a small amount of fiction.

My daughter, Alice, helping with the
photography for the book's cover.

But Disarray also shows that palaeoart needn't always strive to show photorealistic representations of extinct animals. It is possible to have fun whilst making points and asking questions. Illustrations don't always have to be polished, and seeing ideas still in their infancy can be valuable, especially to other palaeo folk. I hope that we see more of these types of book in the future. There are so many good palaeoartists out there, both amateur and professional, and it's never been easier to publish work. (But, we're still in my shop, so enough about them.)

The text-to-image ratio is about 50:50, as I wanted to offer value for money. There's a degree of tech speak – probably not enough for some, and maybe too much for others. And I'm not an academic, so there may be one or two errors – even the odd howler!