Beautiful Oops

This piece centers around the idea of hunting something to extinction, depicting a the history of the great dinosaur hunts and then the final hunt itself. Throughout the piece the eye motif, which is similar to the eye of the dinosaur, is present, suggesting some sort of belief system surrounding a food source. The cavemen hunt with primitive spears, which I chose to draw because they are easy for the eye to read as a weapon.

I used watercolor, colored pencils, and technical ink pens to create this piece. I layered brown and red colored pencils in order to achieve the color of most paints used in cave paintings. The watercolor was used to create the yellow and brown rock, and the ink pens were used to create the legs of the dinosaur and the cracks in the rock.

At first I wanted to make a flower out the ink splot, but decided instead to create a dinosaur-centered cave painting. The cave painting proved to be more dynamic, and the cave-people more interesting than my original plan. I took inspiration from figures depicted in cave paintings to design the humans in mine, noting the way that the figures often appeared to be floating above the ground, with a thin torso and long arms.