Some time ago, my amazing friends Ben and Ashley were eagerly awaiting the birth of their son, Max. They hired me to do four original illustrations for Max's nursery. I was honored and thrilled! They wanted them to be of dinosaurs! I was super excited!
 

After lots of fun discussions on the phone and messages back and forth, we settled on which dinosaurs and styles to use. Two of the pieces were to be black and white ink drawings and the other two would be watercolor paintings.

After completing these ink drawings, Ben and Ashley were kind enough to give me the "OK" to use scans of the drawings as designs for t-shirts and other products over at my Society6 shop. You can view the products here.

The above character sketches were don in preperation for the less realistic, "cartoony" watercolor paintings I made for Max. As a fun way of figuring out which "less realistic" style Max's folks wanted me to use, I did lots of quick doodles and sketches of different types of dinosaurs in various levels of "cartooniness" and realism. Dot eyes? Big scales? Happy faces? Exaggerated anatomy?  These were just a few of the questions these drawings would help answer. None of these characters or drawings were necessarily intended to be used in the final paintings, but just as a way to feel out which approach to take.

 

After sending scans to Ben & Ashley, they picked out their favorite ones and gave great feedback about why they liked some more than others. I knew they wanted a triceratops type dinosaur in one of the illustrations for sure, so I sent them this page of baby triceratops sketches.  As you can probably tell, each one is a different approach to drawing the subject. Max's parents each chose their favorites, including which elements they liked the most.

After that, it was only a matter of combining those elements together into "one stylistic approach" in the two watercolors. And deciding what, specifically, the paintings would be of. And landing on what the compositions, colors, and character designs for each would be. Ok, there was still quite a bit to do. But guys, this part is pretty fun!

 

Below are the final wattercolor illustrations including details and one of the initial ink drawings (before watercolor was added.)

Max seems to dig them! And he seems to like his onesie too! He is such a cool kid. I can't begin to describe how much fun I had on this project! For more information about this project and a rather detailed "behind the scenes" look at my process, just visit my website under the tag Max's Dinosaurs.