The Opal Dinosaur

Mostly I was thinking about how much I love dinosaurs and how cool it was that I was getting to illustrate a dinosaur book! An Australian dinosaur book! With opalised fossils! I read everything I could get my hands on about how to illustrate dinosaurs as scientifically as possible. I visited the museum to draw dinosaur fossils and I watched Prehistoric Planet to see how dinosaurs might have moved.

Story-wise, there were a few tricky things to solve. The main character dies partway through, and I was very unsure of how best to handle that. How to not make it too sad? How to hold onto a narrator who’s no longer alive? I spent a fair while pondering those questions.

Science-wise, I made a list of anything that might be unfamiliar, like the shape of Gondwana, and an MRI machine, so I would remember to draw them all into the book. Overall, I wanted to give lots of scaffolding to aid the imagination and help readers imagine both Australia’s prehistoric past, and modern dinosaur research.

The illustrations were made in a program called Clip Studio Paint. I used one digital pencil for the lines, and then a handful of brushes designed to mimic watercolour for the colours. Each object was built up with multiple layers to get the colour and value that I wanted.

I also scanned in a few watercolour pages to get some nice rock textures for the underground scenes. 

I used the scientific paper which formally describes Fostoria dhimbangunmal to help me accurately draw the fossils throughout the book. Fun fact: On the page with the white background, I drew the fossils at life-size!

For the illustration style, I aimed for simplified realism in both stylisation and colour. This was in order to support clarity, and direct attention towards the facts. I also used colour to support the emotional story in a few points, and to highlight the environmental differences between prehistoric and modern Australia.