'A Disarray Of Palaeoart' - A New Book By Me!

2017: Daily Doodles FOR TWO FLIPPIN' MONTHS!

Every November, doodlers from across the three double-ues go crazy producing palaeo-themed illustrations for DrawDinovember, which is, in effect, the palaeo world's very own Inktober. For those not in the know, Inktober is a month-long daily-doodle event. Doodlers upload their ink artwork to the internet, complete with "#inktober". DrawDinovember is similar, but requires something a little more dinosaurian. Or just palaeontological.

It's pretty loose, and no one's standing guard. Overseeing it is its creator, Brynn Metheney, who lurves her dinosaurs – but she's groovy about it all, and offers hearts and retweets via the official Twitter account, @DrawDinovember. (By the way, you look at what she gets up to here!)

Anyways, I did do doodles last October, though it has to be said that my Inktober offerings—it's starting to sound like some Romano-British pagan cult—were not all of a palaeontological flavour. In fact, most of them were shitty doodles of Daleks and spaceships because, for some reason, I was nine years old for much of October. (It happens, sometimes.) But I fared much better for November, and I ended up with a shedload of doodles of various styles and qualities.

Hmm... What to do with all those sketches.

A book happened!

So, a few of you will be aware that I recently loosed A Disarray Of Palaeoart, so named because there's no particular thread tying everything together. It kicks off with a great foreword from those wonderful bods at Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurs (which was exciting for me, and I'm still buzzing off it), and then there's a false start with a non-palaeo image (but who doesn't like a hornbill?). There's a pretty eclectic mix of palaeo 'strations and styles, with each image accompanied by a chunk of text, ranging from some deep quasi-scientific musings to early-20th-century-style nonsense poetry. ('Nonsense poetry' is a term that bad poets hide behind.)

My youngest, Alice, helping with the photography for the book's cover. (Photo: G. Monger)

The poetry was inspired by the 1913 book, The Google Book, by Vincent Cartwright Vickers, a renowned economist and Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. Vickers was a keen naturalist and it's clear that if he leaned in any particular direction, it was one that was feathered. To summarise, The Google Book is a collection of ink-and-watercolour illustrations of fictitious birds in a fictitious land, complete with verses and descriptions. It's wonderfully whimsical, but its 1913 release was extremely limited, apparently to only a hundred or so copies. Fortunately, in 1979, Oxford University Press published a new edition, and my parents had the good sense to snag a copy.

"Have you seen the Lemonsqueezer, feeding Herbert and Louisa?" From The Google Book by V C Vickers.
(Public Domain)

So that's The Google Book, and in terms of inspiration, only accounts for about 6 of the 114 pages. But it's a brilliant little book and it's worth a shout-out. There aren't loads of them out there, but eBay typically has a couple from time-to-time.

The rest of the book is harder to characterise, basically because it's all over the place like a toddler's breakfast. Don't worry – it's meant to be. It covers pop culture, local history, made up folklore, and straight and speculative palaeontology. Whatever people make of it, I hope that they see it as fun. As one of my day-job customers commented yesterday (in a thick Lancashire accent), "I'm not gonna lie, I didn't understand all of it – but it's got humour in it!"

It wasn't all plain sailing in the Mesozoic. Bad things happened. Maybe not the ichthyosaur thing, but probably everything else. Left to right: A pliosaur crashes into Leedsichthys, resulting in the death of both; Protoceratops boots Velociraptor down a sand dune; An ichthyosaur has the wrong baby: awkward conversation ensues; a sauropod montypythons a pterosaur; a baby Pterodactylus wears all the floof.

The text-to-imagery ratio is probably around 50:50. It's all very well shovelling a bunch of doodles into a book, but an image-only affair might come across as lightweight and a little self-absorbed. So I wrote a load of stuff in a style not-too-dissimilar to this blog. And when asked about 'technical speak' by that gentleman mentioned earlier, I explained that if I worried too much about writing for any particular group, I'd probably wind up dumbing it down, and no one wants that. I'm not an academic, so I fully expect that academics will get that if they read this. But kids are clever, and if they meet a word or phrase which doesn't make sense, they know how to find out what it means. And if I've made a boo-boo, kids will be the first to let me know. And that will be the ultimate compliment.

A Disarray Of Palaeoart is available to buy here, priced £10 plus carriage.

Blackpool's Place In Illustration History, The Passing Of Wildlife Artist David Johnston And Grabbing Your Reference When You Can

The seaside town they forgot to close down...

BA (Hons) Scientific and Natural History Illustration was a successful degree course with an international reputation and was run at Blackpool and the Fylde College of Art and Design until only a few years ago, when short-sighted management decided to turn an important college with students from all over the world into a very average one which tends only to the needs of the local populace. People hardly need a reason to avoid Blackpool; after all, it's an end-of-the-line seaside town with no pre-tourism industry to speak of (and precious little pre-tourism history), and a local government which has no firm long-term plans. It also finds itself high up in national rankings for deprivation, suicide and low life expectancy.

Two shoppers wait for Primark to open against the stunning backdrop of Blackpool Tower and the Fylde coast. (© Twentieth Century Fox.)

A marriage of science and art

The degree, which we used to refer to as 'Sci Ill', was initially taught by a former Technical Illustration student, Dave Johnston, who would become a world-renowned wildlife artist. Although he left the college the year before I started, I would get to know him at the print shop where I work, printing for him hundreds of reference images of myriad extant dinosaurs, but mainly corvids, larids and sternids. Though in his sixties, Dave still valued fresh reference material, though I was always a little surprised that, given his insatiable appetite for photography, there was still any photographic reference left for him to collect.

Die-hard Dougal Dixon fans may remember Dave as one of the two illustrators (the other being Andrew Robinson) who provided images for Dixon's The Illustrated Dinosaur Encyclopedia which was published by Hamlyn in the late '80s. Although I doubt the artwork blew anybody away, the treatment of many of the dinosaurs, especially the ceratopsians, did make them look 'fuzzy', albeit unintentionally, a long time before most palaeoartists were feathering anything other than Archaeopteryx and the odd segnosaur.

The Illustrated Dinosaur Encyclopedia by Dougal Dixon, illustrated by Dave Johnston and Andrew Robinson. (Not to be confused with The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Dinosaurs, by David Norman). Section of stolen blue pallet for scale.

Dave Johnston died unexpectedly last month, which ended one chapter in Blackpool's part in the story of British wildlife art - and it was quite a colourful chapter. His humanist service certainly had a 'rock star' vibe and many of those in attendance had that 'lived in' look. Blackpool has its characters; I think most of them were at Dave's funeral.

Sci Ill was set apart from similar courses in that it employed a full-time biologist (Mike Clapham) who was on-hand to tutor students in biological processes, but his main role was to level the playing field by teaching everybody how to effectively research their subject matter. This was combined with photography tuition; the theory went that your illustrations could only be as good as your reference.

This was a time when digital photography hadn't quite kicked film of its perch, so the entire class went out and purchased a tonne of 35mm camera gear. Every photoshoot ended with a trip to the local film developer, and if you didn't get it right, you had to do it all over again. Not really a problem if you're making clay dinosaurs, but if you're shooting something that's more time and location-sensitive, like the annual Fen tiger migration, it can be a real pain in the wallet. You kids don't know how good you've got it.

Cameras, cameras everywhere...

...and still no convincing thylacines or yetis. In 2016, of course, many of us don't go anywhere without at least a basic camera. Most mobile phones come with cameras as standard, and the quality of these has increased dramatically since they became commonplace some time in the '00s. Better lenses, better resolution and camera apps have between them provided people with the digital equivalent of the Instamatic. You don't really need a dedicated point-and-click camera if you own a mobile.

For artists, mobile phone cameras are pretty handy in that should you come across a scene or plant or something else not so easily or ethically brought back into the studio, you can photograph it with minimal fuss and add it to your reference library. You can record compositions and colours, organisms which you may wish to identify later, and, as was suggested to us during a field trip, evidence of illegal poaching and landscape destruction.

The highlight of my day: a dead bird. (Copyright © 2016 Gareth Monger.)

Whilst out on the school run, I noticed this unfortunate infant theropod in the middle of the pavement, tens of metres away from any obvious nest sites.  We can only speculate about how this animal found its way here. It certainly didn't fly itself there. But whilst I did have my trusty phone with me, I didn't have any means to transport the corpse back to my lab open-plan kitchen/lounge where I could take a better set of reference photos, and maybe ID it. From now on I carry a few plastic sandwich bags - just in case.

(I was going to offer a paragraph or two on the possible reasons for the liberal scattering of dead baby birds upon pavements, parks and gardens, but of course the second I searched the net, I see Darren Naish has already done it! - see here.)