Art Monday: hadrosaur sketching at the museum

Some museum sketching pics from November, taken at the Royal Ontario Museum.

My nephew and I sketching a Corythosaurus skull he found interesting. He's part of the Explorer's Club there, and received a nice treasure for all the visits this year.
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Comparing my Gryposaurus incurvimanus drawing to the original. I like the interesting reflections of the new Crystal architecture on the glass in this shot.
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The Gryposaurus skull drawing is also featured as one of the dozen months of 2009 in my 1st-ever calendar, on sale for about 23 bucks. And there's still time to get it for the New Year.- -
All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Darwin on a pink tee!

In time for the festive Newtonmas to Darwin Day season, there's new items in The Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop! Personally, I'm giving some for Krismas.
The popular Darwin Took Steps image is now available in colour on American Apparel shirts. As before, a portion of the purchase of my Darwin-tees will go toward supporting The Beagle Project, so you wear a surreal image of the controversial biologist-adventurer with pride.

Darwin Took Steps shirts are available in a wide range of colours, as well as four styles of shirt. Just click the t-shirt button and take a look at the choices.
Sweat-shop free, and starting at $23.94 U.S.! RedBubble accepts Australian, U.K., American and Canadian currencies too.
This year I have also put together a calender, a first for me. If you're a fan of my artwork, or surreal scientific illustration, this is the best way to pick up a dozen prints of my work in one place. Here's a some shots of the calender, $22.99 U.S.:

Hmm. I'm kind of digging that white background. Maybe a re-design in the New Year? You can also visit the RedBubble-hosted store and click through to see every month.

Order soon to guarantee it in for Christmas and New Year's!

I've also added cards, prints and canvas-reproductions of my popular Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle in each configuration!

With such a dizzying array of holidays coming up, give the gift of Flying Trilobite.

(Product shots from RedBubble! Thanks RedBubble, you're super-keen!)

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

My favourite museum.

My submission for The Boneyard #26 over at Traumador the Tyrannosaur: The Royal Ontario Museum.

I love the ornate, classic entrance with its detailed relief.

I love the looming new Crystal, crashing into the old building.
The pachycephalosaur intimidates me and enthralls me, lit from below with a purple light.

I love to go there and draw prehistoric skulls, and interact with extinct creatures that never imagined me - and wonder what in the future I am not imagining.

Gordo is wickedcool. You can't take in his whole skeleton in a glance in the space. I love that children and adults can see him from the street.

I'm disappointed no one got my oreodont joke last year: "an early mammal, the oreodont, and it looks like some predator only licked out the soft middle and left the cookie parts intact".

The museum brings out the child in me.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Art Monday: tangling some blue

Last week I was tagged by Mike of Tangled Up In Blue Guy with a blogging meme. So can I out-blue the Blue Guy?

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random arbitrary things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Keeping a blue theme in mind, I'm going to change the rules a bit. I'll talk about my associations with colour, and things I often teach about pigments. Here we go.

Phthalocyanine Blue: Throughout university, this blue appealed to me. It has a green undertone which made it feel dirtier and more like a blue you'd encounter in a mysterious forest. Painting pale flesh tones was daunting early on, so I'd paint them in blue tones. Gradually I warmed up to greens with naples yellow, and then red with naples yellow. But blue was a safe place to start, so far removed from human pigment.

French Ultramarine: I'm going to say this out loud on the internet, and it's a scandal. I'm more nervous about admitting this to Mike than announcing to the world I'm an atheist. I hope we will still be friends. Mike's blog is named Tangled Up in Blue Guy after a song by Bob Dylan. I can't stand Bob Dylan. Oh, I'm not ashamed of this. Bob Dylan drives me nuts. No redeeming value to his music to my ears. This shouldn't be a surprise with what I've mentioned about music in the past. Mike, do I still have a free pass to comment on your blog? Or has it been revoked?

Mauve (blue shade): The Symbolist era of painting in the "Mauve 1890's" is the era I feel the strongest affinity to, though it is almost the antithesis of what I paint. Much of the fin-de-siecle angst was about harkening back to an earlier period of art, literature and myth. Fear of modernisation and industrialisation drive much of the subjects of art at this time. The Impressionist movement was largely ignored by artists I see as heroes, such as Redon, Deville, Moreau, and (my favourite) Khnopff. Instead they painted Salome with the head of John the Baptist, sphinxes and chimaeras, tombs and beautiful Mannerist-style bodies. I love the Symbolist aesthetic, but I am an artist in awe of science when it comes to my subject matter.

Indanthrene Blue: When walking my dog in a wooded park, sometimes we'd stop and I'd lie on my black and stare up at a deep blue autumn sky. And just try to absorb all - that - blue. Beautiful scattered light blue.

Cobalt Rose: Cobalt is an expensive, mildly toxic, strong tinting, long-lasting (we're talking centuries) blue pigment. And it reminds me of Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D, there are a type of goblin called kobolds. And the pigment is named after them, for the difficulty of mining it and for its poisonous nature.

Cerulean Blue: Go to an art gallery, and take a look at the religious paintings. (Go ahead, you can be an atheist and think they're beautiful, it's fine. Think of the talented humans who created them and be in awe.) You may notice that the virgin Mary is often wearing bright blue. No doubt some twisty theological logic may explain this. There's also a simpler economic reason.

Blues described as 'caeruleum' were quite expensive in medieval and Renaissance times. A patron would send the artist to the apothecary to purchase a certain amount of expensive pigments to pridefully show-off their piety. Who to paint in expensive colours? The most important person in the painting would be Jesus Christ. But he was mainly depicted as an infant or semi-nude in crucifixtion scenes.

So the expensive paint would adorn Jesus's mother, Mary. So you know. Praise blue.

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Time to meme-tag. I tag Bond's Blog, Of Two Minds, Laelaps, The Darkened Face of Heaven, Eastern Blot, and The Evilutionary Biologist.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle

"...Evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.
"When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J.B.S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.' "No such anachronistic fossils have ever been authentically found..." -Richard Dawkins

-p127-128, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006.
Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68000-9.

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Finally dry, a new scan of my Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle. Oil paint on 9 pieces of shale, 2008. Prints now available.


Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration A): False Rabbit
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here.

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration B): True Trilobites
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here.
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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Your favourite museum?

Boneyard 26 will be hosted by Traumador the Tyrannosaur! Never participated in a blog carnival before? Curious? It's easy. There's usually an overall theme to the carnival. In the case of the Boneyard it focuses on fossils and palaontology.

Sometimes, the specific edition of the carnival will focus on a certain theme, and for Boneyard 26, Traumador is asking people to write a post about their favourite museum.

Write up a fantastic post about the museum you haunt, and alert contact Traumador by email or comment on this post!

- - All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.