Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Baby Mammoth

Let's return to that series of paleo reconstructions for next month's Ranger Rick magazine.

You may have heard about that amazingly well preserved baby mammoth named Lyuba that was found two years ago in the Russian arctic.

Scientists studying her frozen tissues speculate that she was healthy before falling into a stream and drowning.

I wanted to show her with her mother near the water's edge. Her mother's trunk reaches over her to protect her, as modern elephants do. This concept sketch was drawn out of my head. It was done with water-soluble colored pencils, ink-filled water-brush, and fountain pen.

Tomorrow I'll show how I went from this sketch to the finished painting.

4 comments:

Steve said...

I look forward to the finished painting. The man who led the partial dissection of the baby mammoth, and developed the hypothesis as to its cause of death, Dr. Dan Fisher of University of Michigan, is a friend of a friend.

By the way, Jim, we are in Needham, Massachusetts this week and were pleasantly surprised when stopping in the library here to find a room full of original paintings by N.C. Wyeth!

Patrick Dizon said...

Cool! I saw a documentary about this on tv just a few months ago.

Shawn Escott said...

That's pretty amazing. It looks so intact. Can't wait to see the final!

Caitlin Flood said...

Some scientists want to try to make a clone of her dna or possibly an elephant/mammoth hybrid.