How to draw feathered dinosaurs

STEP ONE: CHOOSING YOUR SUBJECT
The first thing an artist needs to do, besides getting ahold of a pen, pencil, or whatever else they draw with(Blood?), they need to decide what to draw. For this article, we’ll draw a Sinornithosaurus millenii, a feathered dromaeosaur from China.

STEP TWO: SKELETALS ARE YOUR FRIEND!
I cannot stress this enough: If you’re serious about accuracy, you must use a skeletal restoration of your animal! In the fifteen-odd years I’ve been drawing dinosaurs, I’ve only been using skeletals for the past year, and the difference in accuracy is immediate. I recommend skeletals done by Gregory S. Paul, but if you can’t find any, then any other good reconstruction should work. Just make sure it’s accurate! For S. millenii, we’re in luck. There’s a GSP (partial) skeletal in the back of the Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs, one by Marco Auditore on The Dinosauricon, and one by Tracy L. Ford in the December/January 2000 issue of Prehistoric Times. It may be in his new book How to Draw Dinosaurs as well, but I don’t know yet. It has yet to arrive in the mail. (Update: The book came today, and it's not in there.) He also has a reconstruction of the new find that may be a juvenile S. millenii in the June/July 2001 issue. If you can’t get ahold of any of these, there are photos of the actual fossil in the November 1999 issue of National Geographic, but I wouldn’t recommend using it as a reference. It’s pretty disarticulated.
Well, now that we’ve got our skeletals, on two step three!

STEP THREE: DRAWING THE DINOSAUR
Using the skeletal as reference, lightly draw the animal sans feathers. Don’t worry, we’ll add ‘em later. While drawing, pay attention to the limb proportions. While doing the head, be sure to outline the fenestrae. Not only were they probably visible in life, but it also helps in keeping the eye in proportion to the rest of the body. (I always add the eye last. But that’s just me.) Pay attention to the skin outline as well. You don’t want your little pheasant-sized S. millenii looking like a theropodian Ah-nuld Schwarzenegger.

Finished? Alrighty then, on to . . .

STEP FOUR: COMMITING HERESY
OK, so it’s not nearly as heretical as it used to be. But it still meets with a lot of resistance. What am I talking about? Feathers!
For the more unimaginative artist, there are references for the feather orientaion. Tracy Ford’s reconstruction has a covering of straight filaments, while the National Geographic mentioned earlier features a model covered in what appears to be contour feathers. There is no evidence on the fossil of birdlike primaries, so I wouldn’t recommend putting them there. (On my first S. millenii drawing, I not only put on primaries but also apteria, achieving a pheasant-ish effect. Looking now at the fossil, I feel a bit foolish.)(However, I don’t know the conditions of the preservation. Maybe it had primaries and apteria and they weren’t preserved.)(Taking this into consideration, I urge the reader to ignore my recommendation against adding primaries. But don’t go nuts.)

There are two ways to add feathers to your critter. The contour feather approach, in which the artist simply draws an outline around the animal, and the dino-fuzz approach, in which lots of very short lines are drawn outlining the plumage, creating a hairy effect. I usually use a combination of the two. There may be more ways. It’s very late at night and it feels like someone’s squeezing my eyeballs with a pair of pliers while impaling them with white-hot needles dipped in battery acid, so the reader can excuse me for leaving out their favorite method. (That’s right. When I’m not up all night posting on my message board, reading about dinosaurs, writing about dinosaurs, or drawing dinosaurs, I’m writing about drawing dinosaurs. And yet I wonder why I can’t get a girlfriend . . . )

STEP FIVE: COLORING IS FUN
Now that you’ve got the feathers drawn on, you’ve gotta add a little zazz. As in color. Or shading that would indicate color.

I can’t really offer any suggestions here. On to step six.

STEP SIX: THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Now is the time to add an environment for your S. millenii to romp, cavort, and/or frolic in. I don’t really know anything about the type of environment it lived in, but it’s a safe bet it included some sort of soil or sand, and perhaps some trees. Heck, you could even put it in a tree!

STEP SEVEN: THERE IS NO STEP SEVEN
You’re done! Well, I suppose you could scan it, but do you really need me to tell you how to do that?

Well, that’s all for now! So until next time, adios, amoebas!

Written by Will Svensen.