Shishugou Downpour

This is a piece I started last week, coinciding with a much-needed, on-and-off downpour here in Philadelphia.

The setting is present-day Xinjiang, northwestern China, (the Shishugou Formation, to be precise) during the mid-to-late Jurassic (160 million years ago, to be imprecise). Here, a herd of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum — a candidate for the much-contested title of largest dinosaur — treks through a drenched floodplain. Along the way, they cross paths with Guanlong, a distant relative of the much later tyrannosaurs.

This is one of the few drawings in the rain I've ever attempted and I tried to get everything down: The thick, relentless curtain of raindrops, the ripples, the flecks of water dropping off the dinosaurs and the water's surface. I feel, though, that the dinosaurs themselves don't look particularly wet and that I'll need to go in with an eraser to add the shine of the water to their pelts and feathers.

To give you an idea of scale, Guanlong stood about three feet tall and stretched about ten feet long. M. sinocandorum is projected to have reached about 35 feet high and 115 feet long.