An interview with Emily Willoughby, author and artist of Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs

That most obscure theropod taxon Tyrannosaurus chews on bones on the front cover of Emily Willhoughby's new book, Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs: the latest entry into the growing literature dedicated to palaeoartistry. Can we talk about how nice that tyrannosaur knee is? From the Crowood Press website.

The last decade or so has seen the arrival of several notable palaeoart books, articles and book chapters that showcase the works and voices of palaeoart practitioners past and present, such that it seems we’re in a particularly rich literary era for this specialised artform. Among these works are a slowly growing number dedicated to palaeoart methodology: the hows, whats and whys of restoring the life appearance of extinct organisms from fossil remains. In late October of this year, another book in this vein arrived to add to your palaeoart library: Emily Willoughby’s Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs.

I was fortunate enough to be sent a review copy of this new book by Crowood Press, who you may know from my own The Palaeoartist’s Handbook (2018) and the upcoming Witton and Michel volume The Art and Science of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (coming May 2022, vintage palaeoart fans!). Much as I wanted to write about Emily's book, my involvement with Crowood presents a conflict of interest to presenting any thoughts I may have, and the fact that Emily kindly contributed artwork to The Palaeoartist’s Handbook only complicates matters further. But in wanting to do something to promote what I think is a useful, welcome addition to our collective palaeoart bookshelf, I reached out to Emily to see if she’d agree to an interview about creating Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs. As you’ll have guessed by now, Emily kindly agreed to answer my questions and the full interview is below.

But before we get to that, we should give a quick introduction to the book in question. Split into eight chapters and two appendices, Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is a good-sized (280 x 220 mm, 176 pages), well-produced and affordable (RRP £18.99) softback that covers the basics of the palaeoart process as well as reconstruction approaches to several dinosaur groups. Chapters 1-4 cover the basics of palaeoartistry, from restoring anatomy to recreating environments, chapters 5-6 cover restoring pennaraptorans, tyrannosauroids, ornithischians and sauropods, and chapter 8 uses the evolution of feathers as a case study for palaeoartistic prediction. Emily’s qualifications to write such a book, of course, are in no doubt. She is one of the leading palaeoartists of modern times and has been particularly influential in the field of restoring feathered dinosaurs - especially dromaeosaurs. Readers will surely be familiar with Emily’s takes on these animals from her online presence (website, Facebook, Twitter), press release artworks, museum exhibitions and inclusion in landmark palaeoart collections (e.g. Titan Books’ Dinosaur Art II). Even if you’ve been living under a palaeoart-impervious rock for the last decade and somehow missed Emily's stuff, the simple fact is that anyone who can draw and paint dinosaurs like this…

...is clearly someone to pay attention to when they're offering pointers and advice on restoring fossil organisms.

Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is packed with illustrations - over 250, according to the back cover. Many of them are new (at least, I didn't recognise them from other sources) and it's fun seeing Emily take on taxa we've rarely seen her restore before - giant dinosaur herbivores, big carnivores and so on. You don't need to read a word to realise that this is a must-buy for palaeoart fans: simply having page after page of Willoughby palaeoartworks on your bookshelf is worth the cover price alone. Emily’s world-leading reputation is well-earned for her attention to detail, technical excellence and eye for composition. Eschewing the open plains, giant animals and big skies that have been a staple of dinosaur palaeoart for generations, Emily’s artwork is often more intimate, frequently set in densely forested habitats with fallen logs, patchworks of light and colour, and delicate foliage. Her restorations are not only enormously charismatic but also grounded in observations of modern species, good knowledge of animal behaviour, and an appreciation for real natural spaces. Her combination of skills and approaches makes her Mesozoic dinosaur artwork fantastic to look at and also eminently believable. It's difficult not to think her paintings (especially her more recent and detailed pieces) were not drawn from scenes witnessed with her own eyes. We might not know for certain what Mesozoic dinosaurs looked like or how they behaved, but Emily’s artwork is surely in the right ballpark.

Fortunately for those of us secretly plotting to steal Emily’s artistic essence who’d like to learn to restore dinosaurs with that Willoughby touch, Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs has a greater emphasis on artistry and technique than we’re seen in most other palaeoart guides published to date. The closest comparisons I can think of are Douglas Henderson's palaeoart chapters in the first two Complete Dinosaur books but, with a full book of her own, Emily obviously has a lot more opportunity to discuss her craft. She outlines several methods used in creating her artworks such as painting from models, drawing over articulated fossils, and finding inspiration among real environments, while also giving pointers on matters such as composition, traditional painting techniques and finding basic forms within dinosaur bodies. This approach, combined with her patient, clearly-written text, will make the book especially useful to non-specialists. Technical terms are used here and there, of course (it’s basically impossible to write at length about palaeoart theory without some jargon) but in-text explanations and a glossary make the introduction of such terminology a learning experience, not a barrier to understanding. This is not to imply that the book is just for beginners, of course: there are plenty of useful ideas and takes on dinosaur palaeobiology that will be invaluable to artists of all levels. There were certainly some facts, perspectives and methods that were new to me, for whatever that's worth.

A sample page from Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs, from the Crowood Press website. This page features Emily's drawover of the Mei long holotype, a technique that helps artists not only understand the anatomy of their subjects but also appreciate fossil specimens as the remains of individuals, not as mere scientific concepts. Seeing fossils as the remains of specific creatures forms one philosophical core of the book.

And speaking of the text, I found Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs pleasant to read for its informative, slightly conversational tone. It presents a unique voice in palaeoart discourse, neither written with the disembodied neutrality of a scientist nor with overconfidence about her preferred interpretations of the past. There's an obvious respect for the work and insight provided by scientists but also plenty of informed personal contemplation and opinion on matters of reconstructing anatomy and ancient environments. The book is sprinkled with reflections on specific artworks and projects that give a sense of the enjoyments and frustrations of the palaeoart experience, such as including having artwork dating within days of its completion, the intrigue of reworking a familiar taxon with new data, and the thrill of restoring a newly discovered species. It not only reassures us that Emily is experienced at the trade she’s teaching but gives the book a sense of personality. We're also given insights into how Emily views the past, and her obvious connection to her fossil subjects stands out as something I've not seen expressed in palaeoart literature before. Emily reminds us that fossils are not mere geological phenomena or abstract concepts like species, but the petrified tissues of individuals that lived and died for us to discover millions of years later. It's a sobering, thoughtful take on palaeoart that establishes a personal connection between artist and their extinct subject matter across Deep Time.

One inescapable feature of Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is its strong focus on dromaeosaurs and related, fully-feathered theropods - especially Deinonychus - for both artistic and case study subjects. These animals really do take centre stage - something like 80% of the artwork features dromaeosaurs or similar dinosaurs - and they serve as go-to species for demonstrating palaeoart principles throughout most of the book. Tyrannosauroids, sauropods and all ornithischians also feature in their own discrete chapters, but Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is undeniably a show driven by feathered dinosaurs. I feel this is the only aspect of the book that might prove divisive, especially if readers are expecting a more general guide to the life appearance of dinosaur groups. There is value, however, in this doubling down on pennaraptorans. Writing any text like Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs always boils down to a question of breadth vs. depth and, in choosing the former, the book sacrifices some use as a general reference for demonstrating how a deep understanding of a fossil group can enhance our palaeoartistry. Knowing every species, every trace fossil, and every specimen of a clade allows for especially informed and nuanced palaeoartistic approaches, and that’s strongly evident in Emily’s pennaraptoran dinosaur art. For less experienced artists, the amount of information she demonstrates can be transferred from fossils to palaeoartworks may be surprising, and this would not have been so obvious had Emily discussed more clades in less detail. Seeing what can be done with dromaeosaurs and their relatives provides an impetus to learn about our favourite subjects in just as much depth, for which readers are given the right guidance for what to research and where to find it.

The (2017) Jinfengopteryx restoration Emily created for Nature. This image perfectly captures my comment about Willoughby art nailing believability: the colours, the sense of scale and the demeanour of the subject are such that I can totally buy Jinfengopteryx as looking like this. From Emily's website, © Emily Willoughby.

Anyway... this isn't meant to be a review, and here I am writing everything I like about the book. That should give you a flavour of what the book is all about and, as you can tell, I have nice things to say about it. With claxons blazing for those conflicts of interest mentioned above, I recommend anyone interested in palaeoart check it out. But we're not here for my thoughts: let's move on to what we’re actually here to read - Emily’s insights into how the book came to be, the original plans for the project, how she creates her artworks and even some free tips for us budding artists. Huge thanks to Emily for agreeing to this interview, and I hope it inspires you to put Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs on your Christmas list, if it’s not there already.

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MW. It’s felt like a book such as Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs was going to happen eventually: a professional, world-leading palaeoartist imparts their experience and knowledge about illustrating the most popular and in-demand palaeoart subjects. I’ve certainly been around pub tables where artists have discussed it. What made you step up to the plate and think “yep, I’ll take that project on”

EW. It had been a dream of mine to publish a book like this someday, but my experience thus far with bringing book proposals to publishers and agents had been largely disappointing. For my first book, God’s Word or Human Reason?, I and my coauthor sent a total of about a hundred query letters to agents without a single positive response. So when Crowood Press reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in such a project, there was no hesitation on my part!

Your text has an especially patient, welcoming quality that carefully explains a lot of information for newbies, encourages readers to draw along as they read, and there are several step-by-step illustration guides. It contrasts with what I’ve come to expect from palaeoart guides, which can slide into machine-gunning anatomical facts and interpretations about extinct animals at the reader. Was this simply your intuitive approach, or something you deliberately crafted when writing your book?

You were actually a pretty big inspiration for the approach I decided to take in this book. Since Crowood also published your wonderful The Palaeoartist’s Handbook, I knew from the outset that I needed to take an approach that would not overlap too much in content and style with your own. I played with a lot of different ideas early on — including, for example, a separate chapter on each medium I typically work in (gouache, digital, pencil, and so on), but felt that approach was too “arty” and not “sciency” enough. Ultimately I wanted to create something that seamlessly entwined the scientific and epistemological bases of paleontology with the hands-on artistic techniques, and this led to a structure that attempted to educate both professional and lay readers by providing context-driven examples.

This book was an enormous education to me in how damned difficult it is to craft a coherent structure of an entirely new book without much outside feedback. The first month or so of its creation was dedicated entirely to what seemed like endless deliberation, revision, and hand-wringing over the structure, approach and focus. I think the decision I went with turned out decently enough, but I still have a lot to learn in this respect.

More terrific Willoughby artwork, The Silky Serikornis (2015). A masterclass of using depth of field to convey scale. From Emily's website, © Emily Willoughby.

Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs has a huge number of images - over 250 - and you created virtually all of them yourself. How much of that was new artwork for this book, and how long did it take to produce? A lot of them seem very recent - were you basically painting 24/7 until the book was finished?

I would estimate that over half of the illustrations are ones that were created specifically for this book, including a large selection of less time-intensive diagrams and sketches. Of the illustrations that were previously completed, many of them were progress shots or thumbnails that haven’t been put to good use until now (I knew there might a good reason someday for me to save progress shots of long-ago artworks!). A handful were also from various projects over the years that never managed to see completion for one reason or another, and some were finished up from early works-in-progress that were subsequently abandoned.

I had about a year total to complete the book from start to finish. I’m still kind of dumbfounded that I managed to get the book together during the same year in which I wrote and defended my Ph.D. dissertation! I have no doubt that’s something I’ll look back on in my twilight years and think “how on earth did I ever have the energy!”

We get to revisit some of your older artworks in Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs which have a slightly different style and mood to your more recent work. Thinking specifically about palaeoart-specific skills, how has your art and approach developed since their creation?

I still have a long way to go, but I like to think that my work has improved tremendously since I first started doing serious paleoart. For one thing, I’ve learned to enjoy reconstructing taxa I’m relatively unfamiliar with, whereas I started out painting feathered theropods and little else. While the new book still largely features dromaeosaurs and their kin, I had a lot more fun than I expected to have on the sauropods, tyrannosauroids, and various ornithischians that were included. For another thing, I’ve expanded my artwork to a variety of media I never worked in regularly early on—oil paint, gouache, acrylics, and graphite.

I’ve also become more comfortable in testing out new ideas and compositions. Recently I’ve been putting more effort into the environment and setting, which I used to think of as a chore that took away from the fun of painting the dinosaurs themselves. But once it starts becoming fun to paint environments, it also becomes easier. My experience is that the single largest improvement in my artwork isn’t so much in a piece’s overall quality per se, but in learning to work more efficiently—better quality per unit time.

As anyone familiar with your portfolio might expect, Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs has a very strong focus on dromaeosaurs and their relatives, especially Deinonychus. What’s the draw of these dinosaurs over sauropods, ornithischians or more rootward theropods?

It’s no secret that my biggest focus in paleoart has always been dromaeosaurs and other feathered coelurosaurs—I’m a feather-fancier, it’s true. Although I did enjoy branching out a bit for this book, dromaeosaurs remain the group of dinosaurs that I find most captivating and arresting. I suppose the reason for this is that feathered dinosaurs were responsible for my introduction to paleoart after a lifetime of obsessive interest in birds and evolution in general. In the early 2000s, I recall reading articles about some of the exquisitely preserved Liaoning fossils, including Sinorthithosaurus, Sinosauropteryx and especially Microraptor. When I first saw a photograph of the fossil of Microraptor in 2003, I was utterly fascinated, and it caused the realization that birds were dinosaurs to register new and profound understanding. The rest is history!

An inescapable conclusion of Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is that Emily Willoughby ♥ Deinonychus. But her frequent portrayals of this animal are not repeats of palaeoart stereotypes and clichés. In this 2013 painting, Deinonychus is shown opportunistically feeding on a fish, reflecting the less than fussy dietary preferences of living predators. From Emily's website, © Emily Willoughby.

There’s an emotional component to your book that is unusual for discussions about the technicalities of palaeoart. You write about the personal affinities and emotions you’ve developed for certain subjects, and that you regard fossils as not just specimens of not only long-extinct animals, but as long-deceased individuals. An ode to extinct animals, the poem Not Forgotten by Jonathan Kane, ends chapter 1, and you describe Deinonychus as possibly being “the most beautiful animal that ever lived”. There’s a clear attachment to many of your extinct subjects - how much of an influence does this have on your artwork, and do you feel the same about all extinct animals? Or are some subjects “just a job”?

I do think that many natural subjects are beautiful, and it’s hard to not express this when trying to communicate that beauty in my own art. Although I used to think of some natural subjects as “just a job” (especially environments and flora), I feel less that way over time—all natural subjects are beautiful and fascinating, though of course I have my own attachments and biases. Moreover, though, I think that communicating this passion to the public is important to encourage people to think of dinosaurs as real animals, and to cultivate a sense of awe and respect that I feel extinct animals deserve.

You detail both digital and traditional painting techniques in your book. Do you have a preferred medium?

Part of what I enjoy about working in different media is that it’s harder for me to become bored and frustrated. Sometimes I get annoyed at how cluttered and messy my study gets when I work in gouache and (especially) oils for a while, so I switch back to working digitally for a while. Then I may start getting annoyed at how often Photoshop crashes or how Procreate constrains layers and resolution so harshly, so back to gouache it is! Learning and practicing new media is always interesting and keeps me engaged. I need variety. Currently, my favourite medium to work in is Procreate—I love how easy it is to blend, and I can take my iPad to meetings and work. Gouache has always been my traditional medium of choice, but that may change as I work more in acrylics and oils.

I’m also curious to know if you’ve attempted to update traditional paintings when new science forces us to revise older reconstructions.

The one piece of traditional art I spent a lot of time repainting was my 2010 painting of Anchiornis, which I talk about in the book. New to oils at the time, I painstakingly painted a mottled brown and white birdlike critter dashing through a lush green jungle. It was literally days after I was finally satisfied with its completion that the first color study was published, showing that Anchiornis was more likely to be black, grey and red than brown and white. I could have justified the piece as a juvenile, subspecies, or female, but instead I repainted the animal and adjusted the background to the new contrast it required. I’m glad I did, and I sometimes do include minor updates to older pieces, but usually I prefer composing a new piece altogether when new data comes to light.

Emily's 2010 take on Anchiornis huxleyi. This is the second version of this painting which had to be redone after new data on Anchiornis palaeocolour was published shortly after the original's completion. From Emily's website, © Emily Willoughby.

The palaeoart community has long been dominated by males, both in terms of practitioners and fans, such that Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is among the first, if not the first, palaeoart guide written by a female author and artist. With so much discussion around the lack of diversity in palaeontology, your book feels like an important milestone in diversifying the voices shaping palaeoart. Was this something you were conscious of when creating your book

I don’t think it occurred to me at the time that I was the first, given that there aren’t many paleoart guides out there to begin with. But I’m honoured to represent that milestone if so, and I hope the example may encourage others. I’ve already gotten a few emails and even an interview for a project from a few school-aged girls who want to become palaeoartists, which is frankly one of the very most rewarding things about working in this field to me.

You cover a heck of a lot of ideas and techniques in your book, from finding inspiration among natural settings to building models, to constraining colour patterns using living animals to modifying modern plant leaves to resemble those of the past… and much more. Out of this extensive toolbox, are there any that you regard as especially essential - the one or two that, whatever your approach to palaeoart is, we should all be doing?

Remember that prehistoric subjects were living things, and look to other living things (their anatomy, their ecology and evolution, their behaviour, the way they move and interact in their environment, and so on) for inspiration to capture that sense of lifey-ness that lifeless things are meant to have in paleoart. Although many prehistoric organisms were quite unlike anything alive today, they all share an important thing: they evolved to live and move in their environments. I think that this single injunction can go a long way towards facilitating accurate, interesting, and unique paleoart.

It’s not always wise to ask about the Next Big Project so soon after finishing one, but are there any big Willoughby projects we should look out for soon? Emily Willoughby’s SuperBig Dulux Coffee Table Book of Dromaeosaur Art has a nice ring to it...

So glad that you asked! I am about halfway through a new project: Marks on Time, an illustrated anthology of natural history poetry written by my coauthor Jonathan. This will be a collection of 25 poems about evolution, dinosaurs, and human nature, accompanied by about 40 full-colour and brand-new illustrations. If any publishing agents happen to be reading this, please drop me an email. ;)

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Thanks again to Emily for her interview responses, and I wish her all the success her book deserves. Drawing and Painting Dinosaurs is available now from Crowood Press, priced £18.99, as well as from all the usual book retailers.

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An interview with Katrina van Grouw, author and artist of The Unfeathered Bird and Unnatural Selection

If you're the sort of person who's interested in cool stuff like anatomy, evolution and functional morphology, you can't have missed two incredible books published in recent years by author and artist Katrina van Grouw: The Unfeathered Bird (2013) and Unnatural Selection (2018). Although tackling different topics, they are united by their exceptional illustrations of animals in various states of dissection (though mostly skeletonised), lavish design, great production quality and highly detailed yet accessible text. The Unfeathered Bird, which focuses on bird skeletal anatomy and functional morphology, caused ripples in the palaeontological community upon release for being a book which looks at modern birds the way we look at fossil animals. As a monumental book - huge, comprehensive, scholarly and aesthetically spectacular - I'm sure we would all have been happy with more of the same for Katrina's follow up project (The Unfuzzy Mammal, The Unscaled Reptile, The Un... er... skinned Amphibian?) but her latest book, Unnatural Selection, is even more ambitious in scope, detailing how human-controlled animal breeding - the titular 'unnatural selection' - offers a window into the mechanics of biological evolution.

Katrina's new book, Unnatural Selection, available now from Princeton University Press, all the usual online retailers and good book shops.

To celebrate the release of Unnatural Selection a few months ago, I invited Katrina to give an interview about her new book, her art, and her future projects. I do this as a certified van Grouw fan: the Disacknowledgement and I have three van Grouw artworks on our wall in addition to her books on our shelves. Katrina has always skirted the line between author, scientist and artist and, before The Unfeathered Bird, she already had a background in fine art, museum curation (bird skin curation at the Natural History Museum) and book writing. I will fully confess to finding her skills and knowledge intimidating, and was a little frightened of meeting her at the 2015 TetZooCon. After all, if anyone was ever going to expose my work for the hack job it is, it would be this Baroness van Grouw, dual master of detailed anatomy and artistry (lightning flashes, thunder rumbles)*. It turns out that it's actually impossible to be scared of Katrina once you talk to her however, and we remain close friends today.

*Note that Katrina's status as a Baroness is a product of my over-active imagination, not reality. 

There's lots to like about Katrina's books, and I mean no disrespect when saying that they're some of my favourite books simply to look at. Katrina's illustrations - drawn in pencil and then tinted to sepia tones digitally - are truly world class, and her subjects are frequently drawn in lively, life-appropriate poses so that, even when skeletonised or half-dissected, they look very much alive. But it's not only the drawings which make her books exceptional to behold: their size, ivory-coloured pages, font hues and text layouts recall a romanticised age of 19th century museums and scholarship. It's impossible not to think of exhibition halls filled with wooden cabinets, animal bones, taxidermy specimens, curiosities in jars and stuffy formalwear when reading these books. They evoke the atmosphere of a classic age of learning and exploration on every page. It must be stressed how, for their size and quality, both The Unfeathered Bird and Unnatural Selection are exceptionally good value for money ($45-50 cover price, but being sold at £20-25 at Amazon UK, and equivalent in the US). I can only wonder what Mephistophelian deal Princeton University Press has made to to sell these fantastic books at such low costs and, to the poor production editors suffering in the afterlife for making such a deal, know that it was really worth it: I can't think of many books published in recent years that are anywhere near as splendid to look at in this price bracket. For next-level book quality I can only think of tomes like the considerably more expensive (but ultimately disappointing) Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (Lescaze 2017), with a cover price twice that of Katrina's books.

Fans of The Unfeathered Bird will be intimately familiar with Katrina's skeletonised birds. Unnatural Selection offers a greater proportion of art devoted to living individuals, including this jungle fowl, the ancestral species of chickens. © Katrina van Grouw.

But to only look at The Unfeathered Bird or Unnatural Selection would be a huge disservice to their scholarly content. The academic merits of The Unfeathered Bird are widely known and I won't rehash them here - suffice to say that, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll want a copy. Although much newer, the amazingness of Unnatural Selection has already been sung in several reviews and previews (here, here, here, here and here) and I want to quickly add my own endorsement of Katrina's latest book before we delve into the interview.

Unnatural Selection is genuinely a fascinating and thought provoking insight into a side of evolutionary mechanics that we often ignore or stigmatise. Like many people - including other scientists - I've often thought that human-bred animals have little to tell us about evolution because they're somehow 'artificial', and that the genetic interplay that underlies their development somehow doesn't compare to what happens in 'real' natural selection. But Unnatural Selection shows the folly of this view, exploring how animal breeding reveals much about the ease and frequency of trait development, how our breeding choices are analogous to splitting and extintinguishing evolutionary lineages, the mechanisms behind expressing certain phenotypes, and evolutionary rates. Human-led breeding might be shaping animals towards a pre-ordained goal of our choosing, but it's still evolution. Ignoring it severs a wealth of insight and knowledge pertaining to evolutionary processes of any sort, human-led or otherwise. 

The strangely deformed skull of a King Charles spaniel. We view this sort of anatomical modification as extreme, and certainly there are welfare issues to consider with many domestic breeds (and not just dogs, as is most widely reported). But many of the extreme (and healthy) breeds we've created are no more bizarre than what we see in nature. In response to questions about pushing animal anatomy too far, Unnatural Selection responds "...look at what nature has done to the sword-billed hummingbird!". However we feel about the ethics of breeding bizarrely proportioned animals, we're not the only evolutionary force behind their creation. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

It's worth stressing that this is not a book about the ethics of purebreds or pedigree lineages: Unnatural Selection is book about evolutionary science viewed through the lens of domesticated species, and it leaves the politics and ethics of animal welfare at the door. Some may find the lack of ethical discussion a little peculiar given that any mention of animal fancy is so often presented hand-in-hand with animal welfare, but I can understand why this was left out: a good scientist presents their work objectively for society to implement as it sees fit, they don't present science to support their own opinions on a subject, no matter how strongly they personally feel about it. As an animal owner herself, Katrina is on record as being just as concerned with the health of animal breeds as anyone, but she didn't feel her book was the place to share her opinions - I can respect this.

So yes, Unnatural Selection is a fascinating, unique and spectacular book that I heartily endorse. But that's enough preamble, over to its author and artist. I've included, with Katrina's help, a selection of artwork from The Unfeathered Bird, Unnatural Selection and some rarely-seen earlier works. All artwork in this post is Katrina's, and used with her permission.

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MW. Much of Unnatural Selection discusses the prolonged challenge of having artificial selection viewed as having useful insights on 'natural' evolution. As you argue, this seems peculiar - a bit like a physicist arguing that experiments done on atomic particles in the lab have no bearing on 'naturally occurring' particles. Why do you think this issue has persisted for as long as it has?

KvG. I honestly have no idea. I too used to be what I call a ‘wild animal snob’ i.e. I considered domesticated animals as something man-made and irrelevant, though I’ve come to revise my opinions significantly!

It’s always said that Darwin drew up his analogy between natural and artificial selection specifically in order to introduce to the Victorian public the frightening concept that all the diversity of life could have come about without the need for a divine creator. Like the spoon full of sugar that makes the medicine go down. I suspect, as Darwin later maintained in his revised autobiography, that artificial selection was indeed highly influential in the formulation of his theory.

However, even Darwin had problems accepting that certain radical traits (like achondroplasia, or disproportionate dwarfism, discussed in the next question) could be successful in the evolution of wild animals, so he drew a line between them.

Richard Goldschmidt in the 1940s also made macro mutations appear ridiculous as a result of his ‘hopeful monster’ theory, which may have caused scientists to dismiss selective breeding as useless in comparison with evolution in nature. As you’ll be able to see from the next question, and especially in the book itself, there is actually very strong evidence that the same traits not only occur in wild animals, but may be favoured by natural selection.

Four-winged dinosaurs have evolved a number of times, including at the hands of pigeon breeders (pigeon hindwing, or 'muff' foot, shown at the base of the image). Understanding the genetic changes behind the development of such traits may help us understand the mechanisms through which these evolved in nature, something of obvious interest to palaeontologists interested in development of stem birds and avian flight. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

Every so often geneticists make a so-called breakthrough revealing some trend in domesticated animals that sheds light on evolutionary biology, and invariably these ‘discoveries’ have been known already to generations of animal fanciers who breed them. Feathered feet in pigeons are a good example. Every pigeon fancier knows that the wing-like ‘muff’ feet (palaeo-people will know these as ‘hind wings’) are produced by combining two very different foot feather types. Geneticists would do well to pay attention to the knowledge of animal fanciers instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel.

Whereas in past centuries scientists had eclectic interests and would happily turn to the products of horticulture as to botany, or to animal breeding as to wild animals, it seems that the more knowledge that’s available the more blinkered and over-specialised scientists become. I even know molecular geneticists who don’t fully understand Mendelian principles.

Sadly for too many of us, even though the subject of domestication is currently very popular in scientific circles, selective breeding is viewed either with derision or contempt. Fit only for children or eccentric losers, or an emotive subject to stir up the wrath of animal welfare crusaders.

I hope that my book will do something to redress the balance.

Unnatural Selection draws attention to the rapidity of evolutionary modification, specifically how animal form can be dramatically modified in a generation thanks to single genetic changes. You somewhat playfully speculate that this may have had a role in the evolution of some groups - such as the short limbs of mustelids: would you care to suggest - speculatively or otherwise - if any other groups may have benefited from these rapid changes?

That’s right. Though it’s important to stress that the most significant evolutionary change is the result of an accumulation of tiny steps – ‘natura non facit saltus’, as Darwin was fond of saying: ‘nature does not make leaps’. But there are plenty of traits that are single step, all or nothing, changes. Think of the spiralling direction of shells, or horns, for example. Colour aberrations too can result in major phenotypic changes just by the addition or subtraction of a pigment. (Colour ‘aberrations’ are only aberrant when they’re in low numbers in a population, but if they prove to be advantageous, or if they’re isolated in a small gene pool, these aberrations of today can be the colour morphs, races, or even species of tomorrow.)

Vertebral counts are considered a big deal in vertebrate palaeontology, often being used to distinguish different species. It turns out that gaining additional vertebrae is not particularly difficult and is not just the remit of weirdos with extreme numbers of axial elements, like snakes. We've emphasised this trait among species that we harvest for meat, such as landrace pigs, which have several more vertebrae than other breeds. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

However, I’m deviating in my preamble. There are lots, and lots, of other examples, besides the short limbs of mustelids, where you can suggest, speculatively, that the evolution of wild animal groups may have been given a ‘leg up’ (no pun intended!) by a single major mutation. The naked neck trait in chickens is a good one - the heat-reducing naked necks of marabou storks, ostriches, and vultures is comparable and is probably caused by the same genetic process. Henny feathering in chickens (where the male has the same plumage as the female with no loss of virility) possibly has a connection with the seasonal eclipse plumage in waterfowl. Mutations that cause winglessness in chickens may sound pretty gross, but moas were totally wingless too, and there’s no fossil evidence to suggest that they ever went through a gradual evolution towards winglessness. Rex fur in rabbits may seem like just a fancy coat type for the show bench, but a similar coat (without directional guards hairs) allows moles to move freely backwards and forwards in their burrows.

The exact same mutations are equally likely to occur in wild as domesticated animals and their success is all down to whether or not they find themselves in an environment that’s favourable. The ‘right’ environment can come in many forms, and it can change, but traits that might not be successful in the wild for whatever reason might just appeal to the whims of fanciers. There are only a finite number of possible traits that will ever be viable, and the same things tend to occur across a wide range of animal groups, albeit expressed differently. Meaning that speculative zoologists would do well to pay more attention to domesticated animals and the traits they exhibit. This is variation in its most likely forms and a very accurate suggestion of the possible directions evolution might take in the future. Again, the initial mutation only needs to be a start. After that, natural selection can refine it further and fine tune it over millions of years to each particular environment.

Both The Unfeathered Bird and Unnatural Selection are simply stunning to look at, but not all your readers will know how instrumental you were to their design, not only creating the text and illustrations, but also having tight control over the page layouts and overall aesthetics. I gather this level of control is not typical in publishing, and it very much makes these your books. Can you tell us a little about your design decisions? 

I’m glad you asked that; indeed, most people assume that the publisher designed the books, which is the more normal arrangement. I’m exceedingly lucky to have a publisher that has so much faith in me.

After nearly two decades of trying to find a publisher for The Unfeathered Bird, I was painfully aware that many people associate anatomy with greyscale diagrams in academic textbooks. I wanted it to be as much a work of art as of science, so changing the colour of the finished pencil drawings to a sepia brown colour, and printing onto ivory-coloured paper was a deliberate attempt to make the book softer and more accessible and to be suggestive of the beautiful historical natural history illustrations of past centuries. This particularly suited the historical theme of both books: The Unfeathered Bird references Linnaeus (this was a clever way to discuss adaptations through convergence rather than adhering to actual phylogenetic relationships) and Unnatural Selection is all about Darwin and Mendel.

The many faces of exhibition homing pigeons, an example of one of the full page spreads from Unnatural Selection. I can't be the only one thinking the Exhibition Homer resembles a certain piece of Therizinosaurus artwork. © Katrina van Grouw.

Personally designing the books sort of happened by accident – I preferred to prepare the digital image files because I was reluctant to allow the original drawings out of my care. Also, I knew exactly how the different images on the page should be arranged in relation to one another. The drawings are all done on separate pieces of paper, so putting them together digitally myself seemed to make more sense than trying to explain where they should go. After that I discovered that my publishers were also happy to let me choose the fonts, guide the positioning of text, and even design the entire jacket, all of which I loved doing.

I had a lot of fun designing the page layouts, especially the chapter opening pages in Unnatural Selection where I’ve shown historical museum specimens against antiquated-looking background paper. And the three coloured images in the book where I discuss pigment changes. The ‘let’s colour a Gouldian finch!’ page was based on Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints, with more than a passing nod towards Edward Lear’s coloured birds. This pleased me immensely as John Gould treated Edward Lear very badly in life, so it seemed like justice for Lear!

I'm curious about the poses of many of your subjects. Where you have control over this aspect of their illustration, what helped you decide to pose them a certain way, other than the simple practicalities of "I want to show this feature"?

Many of my decisions were indeed guided by ‘I want to show this feature’. The Unfeathered Bird is all about adaptations, so it was important to show the features that I describe in the text as being particularly adapted to specific behaviour. So it made sense from a scientific and aesthetic point of view to show skeletons actually engaged in that behaviour. Husband put together the majority of the skeletons so it seemed fair to give him an input into the choice of positions. We had endless pleasure discussing the behaviour of birds and arguing (in a friendly way) about which position to choose.

Of course it’s not just the position of the actual skeleton, but the viewpoint I select to draw it from. The diver in the surface swimming position may be fairly straightforward, but I decided on a fish’s-eye view, looking up at it from below, as this was the viewpoint that most clearly showed the boat-like sternum, sideways-angled hind-limbs, and razor-thin legs.

A budgie skeleton passes the mirror test, from The Unfeathered Bird. © Katrina van Grouw.

Some of the poses, although superficially just for fun, are for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. The budgie skeleton looking at itself in a mirror in The Unfeathered Bird was a way of showing both sides of the skull in the same drawing (while making it crystal clear that it’s a budgie!). I did the same thing with the reflection in the water under the porpoising penguin.

I enjoyed playing around with visual references, for example I deliberately showed the avocet in the same position as the RSPB logo; the red grouse was modelled on the whisky label, and the robin on the spade handle was modelled on 90% of the Christmas cards ever printed!

For all the major bird groups I included a page showing the feather tracts, musculature and skeleton of a species all together and for these it made sense to show them like an actual group of birds interacting. So I made up little tableaus: three rooks rushing to get a worm that’s just disappearing underground, or a pigeon’s frantic pouting courtship ritual being completely ignored by the other pigeons only intent on eating.

The skeleton of the mighty auroch, one of my favourite pieces from Unnatural Selection. Katrina didn't pose this individual (it's based on a museum mount) but has really captured its implied energy and mass. We might be looking at a skeleton, but you can almost see the muscles rippling as the animal moves. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

I can't look at your anatomical work without wondering how you could translate your skill into palaeoart, and I must not be the only person imagining that a van Grouw restoration of a fossil bird or (based on some of the amazing work in Unnatural Selection) a fossil mammal would be spectacular. Will we ever see a life restoration of a Gastornis, entelodont or Microraptor emerge from your pencils? And can I have a copy if it happens? I'll be your best friend.

Proof, as if it were needed, that Katrina knows her way around skeletons and musculature as well as the best palaeoartists: a parade of cow bottoms. Note the 'double muscle' individual at the end of the row. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

Haha, if it happens I promise you you’ll be the first to know! Probably because I’ll need your help to get it right and won’t be brave enough to show it to anyone until you’ve given it your seal of approval! I’m not adverse to the idea, but at the present moment I can’t envisage how it would fit into the planned book projects which, for the foreseeable future, will be purely anatomical.

It’s not entirely impossible though. With the right incentive (for example, producing commissioned illustrations for someone else’s book) I could probably be persuaded.

Katrina's take on Pomarine skuas. I can't be the only person wanting to see this anatomical expertise and style applied to fossil animals. © Katrina van Grouw.

Before your recent books you were best known for your work illustrating fantastic cliffs and seabird colonies. These are amazing images and I understand a number of folks were sad to hear you declare that this part of your artistic life is behind you. Is the door completely closed to this sort of wildlife art, or will it reinvent itself in some form? And if not, what lies ahead? 

When I finished The Unfeathered Bird I was fully intending to return to those sorts of pictures and to being a fine artist again, but I found that I’d moved on. It’s not that I refuse to do the same work; it’s because my heart is somewhere else now. You can’t force it – it has to come from genuine passion. Ever had a persistent ex who tries to convince you that you can fall in love with them again, while you know damned well it ain’t ever gonna happen? It’s a bit like that.

One of Katrina's pre-Unfeathered Bird cliffscapes, St. Abbs Head, Scotland. © Katrina van Grouw.

To be brutally honest I have nothing but contempt people who find it sad that I no longer do the same old work. It shows a lack of respect for my artistic integrity. It wouldn’t be so bad if these were faithful collectors and patrons from my past, but they’re not. Most, in fact, are creative people too so they should understand that creative development is a one-way process and not a matter of personal choice.

Before the rocks/seabird colony drawings I did images of big dramatic birds doing exciting things: fighting and chasing each other and stuff. Then I had a… I guess you’d call it an epiphany, on the cliffs of Hermaness in Shetland, and my work changed to the rocks overnight. And yep, you’ve guessed it, loads of people expressed regret that I wasn’t still doing the same bird pictures…

The important thing to remember is that the illustrations in my books are just that – illustrations. The book’s aren’t art books showcasing my anatomical art; they’re science books – albeit very beautiful ones. Each illustration is just a means to an end and a very small part of the whole. To me the creation of the book – the entire book, from conception to design - is the creative process. What can possibly be finer than bringing into existence an entirely original and very beautiful book?! It ticks all the boxes for me at every creative and intellectual level.

The important thing is to bring all this stuff – pictures or books or whatever - into the world, and the fact that it can’t be relied upon to be repeated forever is what makes it precious. I don’t know what lies ahead, of course, but I think it highly unlikely that I’ll ever return to being a fine artist. But if I do develop in an unexpected direction, promise me you won’t say it’s sad that I no longer produce books!

Katrina's terrifically moody albatross piece, a big dramatic bird doing an exciting thing. A skeletonised version of this image graces the opening of The Unfeathered Bird. © Katrina van Grouw.

In some respects we have arrived at a similar career path from opposing directions: I became an author/illustrator through training as a scientist, while you trained as an artist before authoring science books. You mention in Unnatural Selection that this professional path was not without its struggles, and I can entirely empathise with this. You have to become equally skilled in two, sometimes very different fields and practical issues mean it's not easy to be highly trained in both. Despite these challenges, you've produced two spectacular and very well received books. How have you dealt with the challenge of transitioning from artist to author who does art?

To be fair to myself, although I was deprived of the opportunity of a formal science education, my world before The Unfeathered Bird wasn’t entirely devoid of science, though it was practical rather than theoretical. I was a passionate birder from childhood, and my interests led me to train as a bird ringer in my early 20’s. I took part in long term ringing expeditions to Senegal and Ecuador and was particularly interested in moult and other physiological indicators that ringers use to age and sex birds. Around this time I taught myself taxidermy and began to assemble my own bird skin collection, and also prepared bird skins for museums. The personal project that let to me to make an in-depth study of bird anatomy (beginning with a dead duck I christened Amy) has been told many times already. Ironically, many of these elements are not things that science undergraduates are taught. I know plenty of lettered biologists who have never even touched a scalpel. That was all back in the late 1980’s so the transition into science hasn’t been a sudden recent change.

Anyone can educate themselves. The difficulties lie in the lack of opportunity for discussion with peers and tutors, and the difficulty of accessing academic texts, but it’s certainly not impossible. Harder to throw off is the bias based on your actual qualifications.

A disproportionately dwarfed "ancon" sheep, an example of a single-step evolution. Such sheep are more common than we may expect, and we have to wonder how often such radical changes occur naturally. It's conceivable that major, single-step changes in animal form could be selected for under some natural circumstances, and may have even played a role in 'natural' animal evolution. From Unnatural Selection, © Katrina van Grouw.

What I find most difficult, and personally infuriating, is people’s preconceptions; the tendency to put two and two together to make five. Many people find it difficult to accept that someone with an art background can have a genuinely scientific interest in something. They’ll assume that my anatomical interests have an artistic root – as though I’m inspired by textures and shapes and all that. And of course I do enjoy drawing this sort of thing, but it’s not the reason for it. I try to explain that if I wasn’t producing books, I wouldn’t be drawing skeletons, but no-one wants to hear that. Even on my book tour this year I sometimes had to really fight to be described as an author and not an artist. One venue insisted on advertising my talk: ‘Katrina van Grouw’s evolutionary illustrations’. It was humiliating.

The most damaging element of all this, and one that I find deeply painful, is the assumption that I must rely on Husband to help me with the science in my books, because I’m an artist (‘only’ an artist is the unspoken word here). In fact neither of us have an academic science background, and both of us formerly shared a career as curator of the bird collections at the Natural History Museum. Husband is indeed useful for mounting skeletons, and for his knowledge of domesticated animals, but I’m the one with the interest in evolutionary biology.

All in all it seems to be a lot easier for a scientist to be respected as a self-taught artist than the other way around.

Being self-taught does have its plus side however. Having to learn science the hard way means that I know a lot of the pitfalls and barriers to grasping each subject, so I’m in a good place to explain difficult concepts to others in a clear way. It’s made me a really good science communicator.

Given that this is primarily a palaeontology-led blog, I feel we should end with the news that The Unfeathered Bird will be making a return at some point in future, and will have a significant palaeo-themed component this time. Can you give any hints as to what to expect?

Yep, that’s right. I actually signed the contract to do a second edition of The Unfeathered Bird last spring, but I haven’t quite gotten into gear with it yet due to all the work of production and publicity for Unnatural Selection.

It’ll have an extra 96 pages, making a total of 400. You’ll remember that the first edition is divided into two sections: ‘generic’ – talking about birds in general - and ‘specific’ – talking about particular bird groups. The new material will mostly go into the generic section, looking at the definition of what makes a bird, what birds are and aren’t, and of course a whole load of stuff about bird evolution.

Red throated diver skeleton, from The Unfeathered Bird. A new edition will be with us one day! © Katrina van Grouw.

Bird wings will be compared with bats and pterosaurs (and Yi qi?). There’ll be stuff about feather evolution (maybe I can get a palaeo reconstruction in here somewhere...), lots of stuff about the loss of digits, the rotation of the wrist, shortening of tails, lengthening of necks, and the orientation of thighs. And you can expect a few active maniraptoran skeletons doing maniraptoran things.

In addition to this I’ll be replacing some of the drawings in the ‘specific section’; adding some more and giving the existing ones a good polish. I’ll be completely re-writing all the text and replacing the short family sections with entire chapters. The total word count is estimated to be around 110,000 words, in comparison with the 46,000 of the first edition. The science will be better, though still easily accessible. There’ll probably be a new jacket design, but almost certainly still showing peacocks. And I’m guessing the original title will be followed by a subtitle (suggestions on a postcard, please).

The Unfeathered Bird NEEDS a palaeo-themed component. It’s incomplete without it, and any reviewer who wanted blood could easily and justifiably have torn the first edition into shreds. But that didn’t happen. Instead the palaeo-world received us with open arms and heaped praise upon us. It was possibly the most humbling experience of my life. This new edition is my way of expressing my gratitude.

--

Thanks very much to Katrina for the interview, and please leave your suggestions for the subtitle of the next edition of The Unfeathered Bird in the comment field below. Personally, I'm thinking Unfeathered Bird II: The Birdening; UB2: Judgement Day; Unfeathered Bird: First Blood Part 2; or The Return of the Unfeathered Bird: Rave to the Grave. Alternatively, use those same seconds to grab yourself a copy of Unnatural Selection and The Unfeathered Bird, both available now from Princeton University Press and all good bookstores.

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Palaeoartist interview: Johan Egerkrans

Palaeoart has never been a particularly diverse artform. Since the early 1800s most palaeoartists have pursued art attempting to depict fossil animals in realistic ways, with stylistic variation mostly along the spectrum of how obvious our brush strokes and pencil lines are, and how much detail we add. In recent decades we've seen artists deepening their dedication to realism with hyperrealist palaeoart, artworks which look like they've been snapped by high-speed cameras with crisp focuses and ultra-high levels of detail.

But not all palaeoartists are taking this approach. Some take a step away from not only high levels of detail but also realism, producing palaeoart with a more stylised and even abstract bent. Though few in number, the growing roster of ‘stylised’ palaeoartists represent an exciting new frontier for palaeoart. In varying artworks along spectra other than tidiness and detailing, these artists are producing unconventional works recalling pop art, classic western animations, heraldic crests, perspectiveless Medieval art and more. Among the most fascinating aspects of these works is their capacity to maintain respect for scientific credibility even when producing stylised, non-realist art. The forms may be simple or sharply angular, the colours may be garish, but we can still tell what the subjects are, what they are doing, and get a sense of their anatomy.

...which brings us to Johan Egerkrans's Alla tiders dinosaurier. If you like stylised palaeoart, you should check out this book. 

Swedish artist Johan Egerkrans is part of this emerging group of unconventional palaeoartists. Emerging onto the online palaeoart scene only recently, his work has already generated a fanbase and widespread acclaim. It's easy to see the appeal of his creations. Distinctively angular, full of personality and recalling great works of American animation, his digital artworks emphasise and almost caricature the form of fossil animals without undue distortion of their form or disregarding fossil data. Attention to details, anatomy and colours make his work interesting to look at despite it's simplicity compared to traditional modern palaeoart. We're not just seeing generic cartoons of fossil animals, but highly stylised versions of contemporary, scientifically credible palaeoart, informed by a clear appreciation for modern wildlife and the natural world. Notice the pupil colour change between his adult and juvenile Microraptor (below), variable integuments on Gorgosaurus (above), fine attention to animal poses and behaviour, and so on. His use of traditional compositions and poses prevent his work becoming overbearing: in this regard, his work is less intrusive, and even perhaps less cartoony, than some artists employing ‘realistic’ animals in hyper-dynamic poses and compositions.

Egerkrans' parent and offspring Microraptor. Look past the stylisation and this is a pretty accurate take on Microraptor anatomy, right down to the iridescent black plumage. Note the pin feathers and dark pupil on the juvenile - very sensible speculations for juvenile maniraptorans. © Johan Egerkrans.

Each Egerkrans work radiates personality: his animals have real character, and it’s almost impossible not to imagine them taking part in animated vignettes. Several of his works have a strong sense of mischief and dark humour, another rarity among palaeoartworks. I’m particularly tickled by his scene of a capybara running away from terror bird Titanis (below): the bird has a mania that captures real birds at their most frantic and chaotic, while the drab mammal looks overwrought, panicked, but also like it’s going to write a strongly worded letter to the Daily Mail about all this. Comparisons of Egerkrans’ creations to stylised fossil animals rendered for the big screen are inevitable, and mostly leave us wondering what the heck everyone else is doing wrong. Hollywood, give this man a job!

Titanis and capybara star in Hilarious Scene of Violence. Capybara won an Oscar for its eyebrows. © Johan Egerkrans.

Johan was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent book, Alla tiders dinosaurier, which I thoroughly recommend you check out. There’s no English translation at the moment (one might happen at some point) but the artwork speaks volumes alone and the design and print quality is excellent - it's a nice book to have, even if you're unable to read the text. The follow up, Flygödlor och havsmonster, which focuses on marine reptiles and pterosaurs, is due out later this year. Both are published by B Wahlstroms, and can be purchased from Bokus and other Swedish book retailers (sorry, American readers, there are complications around shipping these books to the USA at the moment). You can check out the art of both books on Facebook, Artstation and Johan's blog. If you're Stockholm-based, you can also check out a dinosaur exhibition featuring the Alla tiders dinosaurier work, which is running until the end of September.

Earlier this month I asked Johan if he’d like to chat to me about his art, books and palaeoart philosophy, and he’s taken time out of his schedule to give the following interview. With thanks to him for taking time to respond to my questions, it’s time for me to stop gushing about his work and hand you over to the man himself…

MW. You’re quite new to the palaeoart scene, but have landed an instant fanbase with your highly distinctive artwork. Can you give us some insight into your artistic background and what brought you into restoring dinosaurs, pterosaurs and so on?

JE. Hi Mark! Thanks for having me on the show!

I started out as a concept artist and, like most people in that field it seems, I´ve nursed  a deeply rooted fascination for paleoart since... Well, forever I guess. At the age of four my dad gave me Burian´s seminal art book “Life Before Man” and that was it; I was hooked and filled countless A4 sheets with scribblings of dinosaurs, therapsids, pterosaurs and other extinct beasties. I´ve still got that same cherished tome in my bookshelf, worn and coming apart at the seams.

Fast forward to the early 2000´s when I got my first fulltime job as an illustrator concepting for a small computer game outfit called Idol here in my hometown Stockholm. There I did designs for monsters, robots, spaceships and stuff like that. A high point was when I got to draw a series of - listen to this - demonically possessed cyborg dinosaurs!  That´s about as awesomebro as things can get. Take that Michael Bay!

I was always had a talent for mimicking different art styles, which came in very handy at that job - one month you did a superhero game in a highly stylised Bruce Timm style, another month it was horror inspired by Clive Barker, Frazettaesque fantasy or something completely different. I really got to flex those versatility muscles in that environment.

Anyway, after a couple of years Idol went belly up, as small computer game outfits are wont to do. I became a freelance illustrator and found myself working more and more with children´s books. In 2013 Nordiska väsen/Vaesen was released - a book about creatures from Scandinavian folklore that I wrote and illustrated. That really was a watershed moment, as the book did rather well (still does - it's sold over 40.000 copies in Sweden alone so far). After that success I had a certain amount of freedom and one of the things I wanted to do was to go back to my paleoart roots in some fashion. The first such project was a children´s picture book called My first book of dinosaurs. It was originally intended to be a rather tongue-in-cheek affair and the initial pictures were intentionally tropey (large theropod roaring on cliff, cassowary Oviraptor). I did take care to stay off the beaten path though so, unusually for a book aimed at young children, there wasn't a T. rex or Triceratops in sight - I went with Giganotosaurus and Styracosaurus instead.

Mention the tropes, and they shall appear. Egerkrans' Smilodon bellowing off a cliff (or maybe suffering a major case of lockjaw). It's difficult not to see this as satirising the most traditional means of restoring sabre-toothed cats: the lower jaw stretched so far as to make its tissues near invisible, and the skull arcing upwards to attain more ferociousness. Image © Johan Egerkrans.

Pretty soon my science geek side kicked in - I did more and more research and realised I wanted the reconstructions to have a certain amount of scientific accuracy, even if the book was aimed at toddlers. The cartoony stylised style I had chosen for the book could be tweaked into some something more “serious” while still retaining the whimsy and charm of those first illustrations. My first book of dinosaurs was followed by a another one about Cenozoic beasts and by this time I had gotten wind of the All Yesterdays movement and had started following a bunch of paleoblogs (this one and Tet Zoo among them). This new wave of paleoart and the philosophy behind it appealed to me. My editor and I decided to do a “real” pop science book about dinosaurs which was released as Alla tiders dinosaurier ("Dinosaurs of All Ages") earlier this year. I´m currently racing towards the finish on the follow up about pterosaurs and Mesozoic marine reptiles.

MW. Strongly stylised palaeoart is rare, perhaps because we focus so rigidly on precision and scientific credibility in our reconstructions. Where do you draw the line between style and adherence to science, and are there cases where you’ve thought ‘screw science, this looks cooler!’

JE. My aim, in a way, is to do what Disney animators did in films like The Jungle Book or The Lion King. Now, Shere Khaan might not be realistic per se, but the design is informed by a deep understanding of tiger anatomy, and what tigers are like - their “essence” if you will, with the risk of sounding a tad pretentious. Thus Shere Khaan becomes the tigeriest tiger around as far as I´m concerned. My paleoart sort of tries to do something similar - only with extinct animals (though I´m nowhere near as talented as those old school Disney animators). To capture that “essence” you sometimes got to break the rules a bit. It´s a “know the rules to break the rules” kinda deal.

It´s a bit like caricatures come to think of it. People often find it easier to recognise a celebrity from a (well made) caricature than from a photo because the drawing exaggerates that person's distinguishing features. In a similar way stylisation allows me to focus on what’s distinctive about a certain species/genus and bring that up to front.

Parvicursor, from Alla tiders Dinosaurier, is a great example of Egerkrans' capacity to find the essential elements of form in an extinct animal and project them through a strong visual style. © Johan Egerkrans.

Another advantage is that it allows me to remain vague when we’re uncertain about some feature of an animal's anatomy. Take for instance the recent dispute whether tyrannosaurs had lips or croclike exposed teeth. The simplified style allows me to draw something in-between, should I so wish, and leave it open to interpretation. That doesn’t mean I do this all the time and never takes a stand, but it remains an option.

A lot of paleoart seems rather overworked. I´m hardly the first to voice this opinion but meticulously rendering thousands of  tiny scales in a dinosaur picture doesn't necessarily make said picture more accurate. Sometimes it´s the complete opposite where hyperrealism only serves to create the illusion of scientific accuracy. I tend to prefer sketchier, looser paleoart - by artists like John Conway, Simon Stålenhag and of course Zdeněk Burian - where the emphasis lies on movement, mood and communicating that aforementioned essence of an animal - what it felt like.

My most common “screw-you-science” is probably the eyes. The peepers of my stem-birds are more mobile than they probably were in real life; they move around and look at things in a human, or at least mammalian way. Avian eyes are usually fixed in a perpetual stare which makes them come off as either vexed or insane (or both). That might be precisely what you’re after, but often you’re looking for something different. I almost always give the animals discernible pupils as we humans are geared to interpret that as more affective than-all black eyes. Windows to the soul and all that.

MW. Your reconstructions are full of personality and humour. I find it very easy to project emotion onto your subjects. Is this something you deliberately seek with your work? Do you render each image with an idea about what each animal is thinking?

JE. I´ve always had a flair for characterisation. It just sort of happens no matter what I draw, be it a robot, a dragon or a lone animal hanging about doing nothing. They always end up seeming to be up to something (my subjects often look rather smug for some reason, apparently it´s my go-to emotion). There´s a hint of anthropomorphism but I try not to overdo it. It´s just little things like an eye ridge tweaked to look as if the animal is raising it´s eyebrows or the hint of a smirk at the corner of the mouth. It should only be just enough to help the viewer empathise with the subject.

MW. The colour choices of your artwork are interesting, blending ‘realistic’ animal colour schemes with background hues rarely seen in palaeoart. It works very effectively, creating a strong sense of atmosphere. Can you take us through your approach to choosing animal colouration and blending these with often contrasting backgrounds?

JE. I always start with the animal itself and let their colouration dictate the tones of the background. The aim is to give them striking, simple colour schemes that still comes off as believable. Once the animal is painted I start with the surrounding environment, which on the whole is a rather intuitive and organic process. I play around in Photoshop until I land in something that works.

The colour choices and compositions are highly influenced by animation backgrounds, especially in the way the scenes are framed. There´s a lot of colour theory at work as well - complementary colors (often good old orange and teal) or split complementary colours (like red and blue) in different overlay layers make the animals “pop” from the background. A cool coloured animal will be framed by a warmer environment and vice versa.

Dimorphodon meets a neighbour (notice the keratin crest on the lower jaw of Dimorphodon - most artists miss that). In addition to showing the personality common to Egerkrans' work, this piece also shows the mix of realistic animal colouration with striking, pseudorealistic background colours. In fully realistic art, this might not work, but here, it does. © Johan Egerkrans.

MW. To me, your palaeoartworks recall some of William Stout’s illustrations. Both have a distinctive, non-realist style, interesting colour schemes and emphasis on the animal subjects. Is Stout an influence on your work?

JE. Very much so. I've always loved his work and his approach to paleoart. His creatures have tons of character and the draughtsmanship is sublime. They’re admittedly a bit skeletal at times but they make that up with personality. That I’m partial to Stout is hardly a surprise, as we're both inspired by the same old masters. Even if it's not obvious in my paleoart, a lot of my work takes cues from turn of the century illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Dulac and John Bauer, just like Stout's art.

MW. The work you produce is included in educational books. How do you think style impacts the scientific or educational prospects for palaeoart?

JE. The illustrations are not intended to be photoreal and that´s sort of the point. It´s obvious that they're an interpretation which forces the viewers to do part of the reconstruction in their own heads. That hopefully gets their imagination going which is the ultimate goal - to connect and get people interested. To make science fun.

The chosen style also saves me from meticulously rendering those thousands of tiny scales and retain my sanity, so that´s a huge plus.

MW. Do you ever stray from your signature style? Will we ever see a ‘realistic’ Egerkransian dinosaur?

JE. As I´ve mentioned before I always adapt my technique to the project at hand and this is just one of several styles I utilise. It´d be interesting to do a paleoart project in a more realistic vein, though I think there´ll always be a certain amount of stylisation. I´m not a realist painter and never will be - others have got that down already.

Umoonasaurus and chums. The barnacled fallen trees turns this image from just another Mesozoic marine scene into something much more atmospheric. © Johan Egerkrans.

MW. I’ve seen that you get a lot of scientific feedback on Facebook posts, a source that many palaeoartists – professional and amateur – can be wary of because of misinformation and confrontational internet users. How useful do you find social media to shape your art, and have you encountered much hostility?

JE. I was flabbergasted at how overwhelmingly positive the response was when I posted my first drawings on the Facebooks. Especially from the academic community. There´s been very little hostile or dismissive remarks - in general people seem to take the works seriously, as ‘proper’ paleoart.

The feedback is often extremely helpful - there´s lots of very well informed academics hanging about (you yourself and Darren Naish to mention just a few) and you quickly learn to sift the good advice from the bad or opinionated. I approach the forums as a sort of quick and dirty peer review; I´m not an expert and get things wrong all the time and if there´s something wonky someone is bound to point it out. As the ambition is to be as accurate as possible, within the limitations of the style, I try to surround myself with people who actually truly knows about this stuff. As luck would have it a lot of people I admire have proven to be more than willing to help out with comments, constructive criticism, links to papers and by just being supportive in general.

MW. When are you going to get Hollywood on the phone to make your work into a movie? They already look like they’re stills from some epic animated film about Mesozoic life. And they owe us, frankly, after The Good Dinosaur.

JE. I´m still waiting for them to get the straws out of their noses and give me a call. Bastards.

Guanlong and some sort of impudent Mesozoic mammal. Note how the Guanlong is strikingly and variably coloured, and yet still looks grounded. Bringing bright colours into the Mesozoic doesn't necessarily mean painting entire animals in lurid shades. © Johan Egerkrans.

MW. Finally, where’s the best place to find your art and support your work? And how long do we have to wait until your next book?

JE. You can follow my public facebook account “Johan Egerkrans - Illustrator” where I post about new projects and upcoming events like signings. Then of course there is the Paleoartists Facebook group where I´m pretty active.

I´ve also got a blog at http://johan-egerkrans.blogspot.se/ and an Artstation page https://www.artstation.com/artist/egerkrans.

My books can be bought from www.bokus.com or any other Swedish book retailer. You should be able to order them from there if you live in Europe but it's trickier in the States due to the fickle nature of the U.S. customs. Hopefully Alla tiders Dinosaurier will get an English edition at some point, but nothing's set at the moment.

The next book Flygödlor och havsmonster, about your favourites the pterosaurs (and their marine contemporaries), will be out in Sweden this fall. At some point I´d very much like to do a book about Permian and Mesozoic stem mammals (gorgonopsids are hands down my favourite prehistoric animals), but sadly it is a rather tough sell…  

MW. Johan Egerkrans, thanks very much!

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