RR: Can you tell me a little about how clients find
you for their dinosaur-related projects?
JG: Some opportunities have come from visiting scientists in museums or conventions. Other times I’ve gotten jobs as a result of sending
samples to art directors. In the age of the Internet, I suppose art buyers find out about my
work from my blog, my website, or my videos.
RR: Are there concerns or challenges p articular to
creating images for stamps?
JG: Yes, definitely. Recently, Australia Post commissioned me to design
a set of postage stamps showing six
prehistoric animals in a panoramic
landscape. The project took several
months and required a lot of work
behind the scenes. The research
stage was especially important since
Australian dinosaurs are known
only from fragmentary fossils, most
of them recently discovered. Some
of the dinosaurs would have to be
reconstructed from single bones, so
a good deal of extrapolation would
be required.
stamp subjects inside it. One of the challenges
of this kind of layout is that each stamp has to
make sense by itself when it is detached, but
it also has to work in the context of the larger
scene. The design also presents a challenge of
relative size. Since dinosaurs came in greatly
varying sizes, the larger dinosaurs had to be
pushed farther back in depth in order to be able
to fit into the stamp grid.
I also had to be aware of fixed requirements
of the stamp design. Each stamp needed to
include the word “AUSTRALIA,” plus the
Before I went too far with sketches, I traveled to Melbourne to
meet with the museum specialists.
I spent more than a week studying
the collection of the Museum Victoria under Tom Rich’s guidance.
We looked at the bones not only
of the dinosaurs, but also the large
amphibian Koolasuchus and various insects and small mammals that
lived alongside them.
I also visited the Royal Botanical
Gardens and some forest parks near
Melbourne to sketch the growth
habits of plants that were analogous
to those of the middle Cretaceous.
During this period, southern Australia was just beginning to detach
from Antarctica and it was still a
polar climate.
Like the “World of Dinosaurs”
stamps I did for the US Postal Service, this was a larger panorama with
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Garden of Hope from “Dinotopia: World Beneath.” Image courtesy of the artist.
SciArt in America June 2015