JP: Good Mother Reptile

To fellow dinosaur enthusiasts who know better than me...I apologize if this doesn't look entirely like the creature I intended, but I hope you may forgive me. I had few to no references handy when I drew the base for this, so I thought I'd do good by referencing the skull of a close relative; Hadrosaurus. And now that I've finished this, I feel iffy about that low ridge on the top of the head...stupid inaccurate references. Maybe I should have just looked online....

But to everyone else, this is Maiasaura and a baby -- the name meaning "good mother reptile" -- one of the duckbilled dinosaurs of the hadrosaur family. You'd expect to see a bunch of babies with a mother, but this image is based off a scene in the original novel of the awesome Jurassic Park -- where Grant and the kids had fled up a tree to get away from a herd of stampeding hadrosaurs (and their pursuing Tyrannosaurus), and after the action there appears this beige creature, totally unaware of their presence as it munches on the foliage at their level, occasionally bringing mouthfuls down for its one baby. (There being only one youngster because it was introduced by the staff of the park -- the whole thing on controlled breeding and cloning all the animals.) ...So I was obviously listening to the movie's soundtrack when beginning this picture.

So yes, here is my first dinosaur picture in years...and my best. I really wanted to make something in honor of the novel of Jurassic Park, and it boiled down to this and Nedry finding a Dilophosaurus by his Jeep. The latter would have been dramatic, and I bet I would have had fun with it -- being so good with dimly-lit scenes -- but, well, we've seen plenty of carnivorous dinosaurs in art (and understandably so, for they are very appealing to the eye and a predator-prey chase is exciting), and I decided to put one in for the underrated, gentle herbivores. The colors are based off descriptions in the book, and since the baby was described as having dark/black spots, I decided to give the adult discreet spots that have grown fainter with age. The eyes (of the adult) were described as being "soft like a cow's", so I tried to convey that with a golden-brown color. I guess it's not a very interesting creature in terms of color...but that did make it a little easier on me to paint.

The reason why I wanted to make something in honor of the novel is because of the release of the long-aticipated (for me) Jurassic World. I'm quite excited for it -- I am definitely going to see it on the IMAX. I expect an exciting ride, eye-popping special effects, and I HOPE TO GOD that it's better in general than the last movie. (That was terrible.)



...Speaking of dinosaurs, anyone else hear of the new creature remains found in Canada -- a ceratopsid I think was named Regalceratops? It got me excited. Made me remember that I need an updated dino encyclopedia, with all the discoveries that have been made since the early 2000s.






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