Category: Art

Watching Prehistoric Planet, launched on Apple TV this week, reminded me of the first book that I illustrated in colour, John Man’s The Day of the Dinosaur, published by Bison Books in 1978.

I can see the influence of a favourite book from my childhood, Prehistoric World, written and illustrated by Carroll Lane Fenton, in my drawing of Diplodocus but my use of colour was based on a method used by Frank Bellamy in his Eagle comic strips Fraser of Africa and Heros the Spartan.

As the book was printed using the standard CMYK four-colour process, I used just three bottles of ink – red, blue and yellow – mixing them to get my greens, browns and – as Bellamy called them – ‘phoney greys’. But instead of the regular black for the line work, I used sepia brown ink.

I can see that I went a bit too much towards the brown with this title page. This shot of a smaller dinosaur scampering nervously beneath one of the larger species is used to good effect in Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet and the designer of the book told me that the rough that he’d drawn for this spread helped them sell the project to a publisher.

My reference for the background for the title page came from my sketchbooks from one of the glasshouses at Kew and from my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten osprey reserve.

Looking at my first attempt at this Tyrannosaurus Rex attacking Corythosaurus, the designer said, ‘I want the kind of tension you get you try to take a bone from a dog.’

This was the best I could do.

Prehistoric Planet features at T. Rex that has just made a Triceratops kill and I have to admit they’ve caught that ‘dog with a bone’ tension in their CGI, with muscle and sinew convincingly present beneath the skin, but they do have a team of experts to help them. I had to make do with my brother Bill (off work on sick leave at the time) making up and painting every dinosaur plastic model it that I could lay my hands on.

I held the T. Rex model close to my eye to try and get the effect of it looming above the camera and I remember constructing a rough perspective grid to box in its proportions. I rotated my model of Triceratops to build up the herd.

In Prehistoric Planet there’s a sequence of the pterodactyl Quetzalcoatalus, nesting in a luxuriant tropical forest. It had been recently discovered when I illustrated the book and I imagined it in an arid savannah type setting, feasting on a brontosaurus carcass as vultures might gather at a kill today. I couldn’t work out how Quetzalcoatalus, the largest flying animal that ever existed, could then have taken off again, after it had filled up on food.

Prehistoric Planet makes its initial hop and glide look aerodynamically convincing.

As this was my first set of book illustrations in colour, it was a bit of landmark for me as I started on my freelance career and, to borrow them for an exhibition, I approached the publishers, Bison Books, then operating from a basement in Cromwell Place, just opposite the Natural History Museum. Could they look them out and take them round to the RCA Illustration Department just across the road, where the then head of illustration, Quentin Blake was organising the show.

No luck. I remember that managing director looking at me as if I was making an outrageous request.

So if you’re the current editor of Bison Books, and you happen to be reading this could I remind you that it’s about time that you handed back the originals please?