Pinned
the holiday season is here and so is my moving date! I'll be pausing orders a little early this year to work around the move and ensure everything makes it out in time for the holidays. This means you have until 11:59pm EST on Wednesday December 10 to place any orders from my online shop before the new year.
alternatively, if you live in the NYC area, you can come find me at the Holiday Market run by NOMAA (Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance) on Sunday the 14th! details below the cut:
Ceratosuchops inferodios (prints now available on my store!)
Archaeopteryx lithographica, literally! This project was such a cool thing for experimenting with a new print process and for some paleoart research. You may have heard that the Solnhofen limestone, where this bird hails from, is a classic lagerstatte site (a fossil site marked by exquisite preservation, including soft tissues like feathers), but the reason why it was so heavily quarried in the early days of paleontology was that the limestone was perfect for lithography stones. Lithography is now mostly a fine art technique, but until the advent of digital printing, it was the best way of mass-producing images. Just as the fine-grained stone enabled near-perfect reproduction of an artist's drawing, the limestone also retained detailed impressions of feathers on the bodies of a few small flying theropods, enshrining Archaeopteryx's status as the "first bird" for centuries to come.
I'm so glad I get to finally share this recent big print with you all! The animal in this piece is a dire wolf (the real kind, Aenocyon dirus, not the Game of Thrones or Colossal-clone kind) running over an asphalt seep inspired by the famous site at La Brea. This plate was editioned during a weeklong workshop "Innovations in Lithography" at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in CO, taught by the amazing Valpuri Remling and Brian Shure. One of the really cool techniques I learned at this workshop was the method I employed to paint the tar pit in the foreground: the silhouettes of foliage are real plants, collected from the art center grounds, and used to create a resist for the pure black tusche wash. It was a great week, I met lots of amazing people, and learned an incredible amount about lithography, some of which I'm already incorporating into exciting new projects.
Purchase 3 or more prints in my Dinocuts series (previously called 'Paleo Miniatures') and get 20% off with the code 'DINOCUTS' at checkout! (all 6 prints are also available individually)
