About the Me

I am an artist, and as an artist, I like to make things that are both new and good.

There is a widely held notion that painting, as we knew it, is dead. There is no more stylistic innovation, no where to go. I am not of this opinion. There's more to art than style, what art represents matters.

So in the pursuit of the new, I explore some subjects that are not often found fine art. It is difficult to believe that our vastly expanded knowledge of the world, and our continuing experiences in it, aren't providing enough to keep painting fresh. (Dinosaur palaeontology alone provides artists with enough subject matter to fill a career!)

In the pursuit of the good, I attempt to understand my subject as well as I can, and to make something beautiful with it. I will happily steal any style to further this aim. Or even attempt to be stylistically innovative.

Of course, a lot of my art isn't so high-falutin', I just paint things because I like the idea a lot of the time.

The Process

Most of my work is painted Adobe Photoshop, or Procreate on an iPad,and some of my work is made in Adobe Illustrator. Some of my art is created programatically, and for that I use Javascript on (HTML) Canvas. I write code for these in BBEdit.

My palaeontological work involves quite a bit or research, which is an ongoing, never ending process. Turns out that palaeontology is an fast-moving field. Often I rely on the work of others for references, Scott Hartman’s skeletal diagrams are particularly useful to me.

Podcats

Darren Naish and I have a podcast, also known as a podcats, officially called the Tetrapod Zoology Podcast. The show aims to be twice a month, in which we discuss animals, palaeontology, and monster movies. A well loved child has many names and hashtags, and ours has several: #Tetrapodcats, #TetZoopodcats, #TetZooPodcast, and probably others.

Sauropods.win

I run a Mastodon server called Sauropods.win which you can join if you like.

I used to be on Twitter, but I have since moved entirely to Mastodon, and you can follow me there at @john@sauropods.win, or you can follow my art using my RSS feed. I'm also on Tumblr and DeviantArt.