My very own Darwinopterus

As readers will remember, a couple of weeks back I dropped in on Luis Rey to talk over dinosaurs, pterosaurs, classic rock albums and help him get a blog up and running for his new artwork. Inevitably the conversation at one point turned to thinks Luis hadn’t yet done and things I was interested in seeing. I noted that for all the raft of pterosaurs Luis had thrown out in recent year, neither Darwinopterus or any of it’s close relatives had made it into his collection and given the novelty and importance of these taxa, it should surely be high on the priority list.

Luis simply suggested I sketch what I had in mind and he’d have a go. The turn around was rapid and the result was beautiful and here it is already:

I sent Luis some images of the wonderful Darwinopterus robustodens specimen as a source for proportions and general anatomy and produced a sketch of the posture I wanted. I can’t remember ever having seen a picture of a pterosaur about to land on a tree and that’s what I went for. I’ve seen plenty of them in trees, flying between trees and even taking off, but not in the act of landing. I’m also a big fan of unusual image shapes for art and love things that eschew the normal A4-type proportions, so I specifically asked for something very tall and thin to emphasise the height of the tree and the wingstroke. Anything other than that is shackling the artist (especially when it’s Luis) and something I don’t like to do if I can avoid it, so I said nothing about colours, patterns, background etc.

Anyway, here it is (and here it is on Luis’ pages). My massive thanks to him for his work and for crediting me with far too much. Head over there and tell him how awesome it is for me.