Tyrannosaurus rex Acrylic on Canvas

November 23, 2023

Here is a story of how this one came to be. For whatever reason, my wife and her mother decided to visit virtually every HomeSense store in the Ottawa area. I was naturally drafted into accompanying them on a couple of these expeditions and I saw a wide frame painting of a dinosaur in one of the stores. So I thought I would take a stab at doing a dino painting.

I bought a 24×12 pre-gessoed canvas at Michaels and did some sketches of how my dino (a T-rex, naturally) could look.

I eventually decided that the above sketch was more or less what I was going for.

I did a quick study using a page from an acrylic pad to work on some techniques for trees and to get an idea of where I was going.

I then added a dinosaur.

This is the big difference between acrylic and watercolor — you can do a complete background in acrylic, then add foreground elements.

While not exactly buoyed by this effort, I decided to press ahead with the canvas.

A delightful sky, ocean, and scrub brush ground. Too bad we are going to ruin this with a dinosaur later!

Added a couple of islands and trees.

I drew the sketch of the dinosaur in the size needed for the painting on 11×17 cartridge paper.

Now the trick was to transfer this drawing to the canvas. I bought some “transfer” paper (what we used to call carbon paper) off Amazon for this purpose, taped it to the back of the drawing and traced the drawing onto the canvas. It’s a little faint, but if you look carefully, you can see it.

Now it was time to fill in the main character.

Did some stuff to give the skin some texture, but wasn’t too happy with the leg, it didn’t look natural.
So I smoothed out the hip and flattened the back a bit and called this one done.