Drawing Dinosaurs: My Pastel Artwork

Remember my book Rumble, Roar, Dinosaur! that's just come out? Well, preparing my post to tell you about it, I suddenly realised I had very few of the illustrations to show you.

I always get my original pastel drawings back from the publishers (they only buy the rights to use it, not the artwork itself), but I like to have a copy of the professionally scanned, digital versions too: very handy for self promotion and, of course, blogging.

Usually I'm sent digital files automatically, towards the end of a project, to do my various bits of finishing work. But, for some reason which I've now forgotten, I couldn't do the finishing for Rumble, Roar, Dinosaur! so the designer did it instead. As a result, I never got my scans. Oh no!


Anyway, my editor at Macmillan kindly posted me out a DVD, and I've been loading dinos onto my computer. Trouble is, because of the flaps involved in this artwork (piled up in Photoshop layers, with die-cut guides and all sorts) the files are SO MASSIVE that each one has been taking roughly the lifespan of a your average dinosaur to open up on my poor, frazzled computer.

There can be few things more frustrating than staring at that nasty little egg-timer for about 10 minutes, then realising the computer has locked up and you've got to begin all over again. Grrrrrr: I feel a T. Rex moment coming on...