Fishing at Dawn
April 9, 2012
Unenlagia comahuensis looking for fish at dawn.
What can I say, it’s been over a year since I tried my hand at something more artistic than a muscle or skeletal reconstruction. I did the sketch over a year ago, and had it ready to go (it’s a digital painting in Photoshop), so I decided to give it a crack and it fell into place a lot faster than I’d expected (most of the time was spent painting water detail).
I’ve reconstructed Unenlagia as somewhat less ecologically specialized than it’s relatives Buitreraptor and Austroraptor, but fishing nonetheless. I don’t really have a lot more to say about it - we’ll get back to more hard core skeletal stuff soon, I promise! If you have any questions about the process I used I’ll do my best to answer in the comments section.
14 comments
Beautiful! I'd love to see more of your work above and beyond the skeletals.
btw... water with smudge tool?
Thanks David - the water is basically two steps - I got some of the depth of field blur and high frequency noise by creating a custom depth field and a displacement map, applying them in the camera blur and zigzag filters respectively. Then I went in and painted the ripples with the brush tool, varying how hard the edge was and how quickly the paint covered it based on need.
Beautiful! I'd love to see more of your work above and beyond the skeletals.
oh, seems someone already said that ;)
@ Heinrich - Great minds I guess. Anyhow, unfortunately you guys pretty much have seen all the non-skeletal stuff I've done; I don't really work as an artist much, so it's far and few between projects. I appreciate the encouragement though!
He's also suspiciously close to perfectly profiled ;-) (Unenlagia, not Heinrich ;)
But darned if it ain't a completely successful piece. Congrats!
@David - there's actually quite a bit of soft lighting detail in the original, it just doesn't survive shrinking and jpeg compression very well.
It looks surprisingly photo-real. Well done!
Realllllllllly niiiiiice!
What a beautiful image Scott - so peaceful. Love your skeletals as always, but do hope we also get to see more of these in the not-too-distant future...?
@Donna - Thanks, that means a lot coming from you! I've actually been mulling over an image like this since I saw one you did for Don Lessem's Utahraptor book that was strongly backlit. Man, that was a while ago...
@AVS - I'm not sure when you'll see more; I enjoy life reconstructions, but they can be time consuming and generally aren't what I am contracted for. But we'll see.
I could see this in a photography collection. If Unenlagia was still alive.
Thanks Anon; I was intentionally referencing the look of bird photography when I did this, so I'm glad it conveyed the intended effect.
I really love this picture.
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