MORE LIKE A SIX-FOOT TURKEY

"Hold onto your butts."
I'm excited to share my latest project, a fun and interesting one to work on: the design for a model kit box that will hold a tiny dinosaur (rawr).

Tyler Keillor sculpted this little guy in ZBrush with the help of the supporters of his Kickstarter project, the people at ACME Design, Inc. and Exact Metrology, Inc.You can find his whole story here. We went with a design reminiscent of old Aurora model kit box art - painterly and bright - but not so silly or anatomically incorrect...

He looks crazy happy with that tongue sticking out

I created the background painting referencing an image of the Dryptosaurus head that Tyler had sculpted (amazing work!) and made some hand-drawn lettering, evoking a vintage museum tag look for the name of the dinosaur. Finally we included the rendering of Tyler's digital sculpture to show what's in the box, like more modern model kit boxes.

The background painting, acrylic on panel

This was such a fun project to work on, I loved building model kits as a kid. My dad and I would always be visiting the model shops on weekends looking for some cool car, plane, spaceship or robot to patiently glue together and painstakingly paint to perfection. We actually ran out of room to display our models in the house. But, I think a certain Velociraptor model from a certain movie resides in my parents' living room to this day..."I'm simply saying that life, uh... finds a way."