Motherhood: Concept Drawing

Now that I've gotten some of my other paintings out of the way and fixed up, time to get back to my dinosaurs.

I set up a still life that features one of my toy dinosaur and some fake wooden eggs. As I started laying out the painting, I realized that I was having a hard time getting the full dinosaur and eggs into the painting. If I did, then the dinosaur and eggs were too small (the tail is pretty long). It wasn't that interestinsg. So, I decided to use Photoshop to work on the composition.

My general technique with Photoshop is to take a picture of the entire area with my camera. Bring it into Photoshop and set the Square Selection Tool to be a fixed size. In this case, It is going to be a 9" x 12" painting. From there, I resize the image and crop out different areas to create a composition. In this case, I wanted to focus on the eggs and the front half of the dinosaur. Make it look like she's watching over it. This way, I can get the detail that I want from the creature and the eggs.

Once the composition is done, I then work on doing a drawing. This helps solidify the composition. Whenever I'm not working directly from painting the entire still life setup, I always do a drawing. It helps me remember the shapes and let's me compose different ideas in my head. Easier to do it during the drawing phase, than the painting phase.

So, pretty happy with the composition, so far. Time to begin painting it.