The illustration of iAllosaur ® is to the credit of Joel Rivers. While we see his talent and hard work as speaking for itself, we asked him if he could also share his artistic process and his inspirations.
Q: This was a project where you were asked to illustrate a natural world that is available only as fossil record. We know that you approached your work very much as a research assignment, not just as a drawing challenge. Can you share approximately how much research went into your efforts?
I have been interested in dinosaurs since I was 4, so a long time. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid, so I studied books and drawings and went to the museum to see their bones - in my case it was the in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but any natural history museum would have done.
Around 1980, I had to re-learn everything I knew about dinosaurs. "Heretical" scientists like and had just put forward that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, in the face of all the prevailing theories regarding them. I had a learning disability, and still read with difficulty, but a text book, written for college-level students called , by - with beautiful pointillist drawings by - captivated me at the age of 10. That was in fact the book I learned to read from - So dinosaurs and I go way back, and I guess you could say I grew up with them.
Recently, with iAllosaur and other projects I've re-discovered dinosaurs in all their glory. Things have changed again; we know much more about the way they looked and moved and even raised their young.
Q: In the course of this project, we suspected you would have gone out into the field on fossil digs if we had been able to arrange it. Tell us you didn't dig up your backyard on your own.
Well, no but I did spend considerable time looking over what skeletons I could. I approached this project not as a scientist, but as an illustrator who was after scientific accuracy. In animation, traditionally, you produce a stylized version of whatever you are animating, because you have to draw it over and over again. With iAllosaur, I tried to be more detailed than usual.
Q: Tell us how you went about drawing the Allosaur in particular.
Luckily, I know Allosaurus well, as there was a 35-foot skeleton at the Steinhart and I must have looked at it hundreds of times in my life and sketched it a few times over the years.
Once I clothed Allosaurus in muscle and skin, I had to guess as to color, but the texture would have had to been scales for any larger dinosaurs, warm-blooded or not. Small dinosaurs had feathers, as we now know, but the big ones didn't need the insulation. Allosaurus was adorned with two blade-like projections of bone high on the snout, probably for inter-species display, perhaps head-butting, or just to protect the eyes. I drew him from the side, the head from the front, creating a character model for use as a guide in the animation. I did a three-quarter view of the head, the eye focused forward as if locked on the viewer, that's when the Allosaurus came alive for me. You would not want to be that close 150 million years ago to an Allosaurus!
Q: Tell us more about your approach to animation - going beyond illustration and putting characters into motion.
Well, after we agreed on the Allosaurus character design, we needed a range of basic movements for behaviors, starting with a basic "walk cycle". This was trial and error on the outset, as I had not done any animation since I was an art student. I did do a lot of sketching, and have always loved the way birds move, and that helped with the two-legged Allosaurus. The quadruped species, Brachiosaurus, Apatosaurus and Stegosaurus, are quite different from each other, and once I looked at their skeletons, and their limb proportions specifically, I tried to find large animals with similar proportions. With Stegosaurus strangely, the Capybara, a giant aquatic rodent, was the best fit. My savior in this work was , the ground-breaking motion photographer. His book is where I got the Capybara movement cycle for the Stegosaurus. That and the animation of re-schooled me on approaching various walk cycles. We then had to test the results to get the kinks out, but that was the start.
More Questions for Joel? You can email Joel at or visit his web site at
