Skeletal Drawing: The Great Skeletal Repose of 2011: A Retrospective

Well, it's 2012, so the Great Skeletal Repose of 2011 must officially come to an end. Most of the bipedal skeletals in my collection have been reposed much like this Velociraptor. I had plenty of things to say, and we saw some great discussion by guest writers, but when it comes right down to it, the issue feels incomplete without some sort of summary as to how I got here, and what's left to do. So let's take a quick look at where things stand now...

To some degree, the walking pose shown above was selected by acclimation. When I started to show off different types of poses, by far the most popular was the walking pose you see above. And I want this pose to be one that other scientific illustrators can feel free to adopt, so widespread can only enhance that proposition. But it wasn't just a popularity contest - there are several practical reasons why this walking pose became the winner:

The Good

1) Utility - Greg Paul of course will continue to use his pose, and a number of previously published skeletals by other authors (including all of mine up until last year) had adopted the same pose. By selecting the walking pose the retracted left leg remains unchanged, allowing for a easy comparison of the proportions. This was probably the biggest factor.

2) Functional Aesthetics - The old pose of animals sprinting along at a lively clip tended to impose a specific hypothesis of activity on the animals. While in some cases dashing along may have been quite likely, it still required that a research who wanted to use the skeletals to swallow that hypothesis, whether they agreed with it or not. With Velociraptor that wasn't unlikely, but with larger theropods it became needlessly controversial, and with graviportal taxa like therizinosaurs the results could be laughable.

3) Laziness - I prefer "efficient" over "lazy", but no matter what label you place on it, this pose required a minimal amount of alteration to my existing skeletals. And the stark reality is that when you have to repose hundreds of technical illustrations that time adds up. Quickly. Of course this reason would not have been sufficient if it weren't for the more important points 1 & 2, but it sure was a nice bonus.

Does that mean I'm thrilled with the outcome?

Yes and no. Since I'm starting with a blank slate, it would have been fun to come up with something truly distinctive. Yet the allure of the new wasn't worth sacrificing how useful the skeletals were for comparative purposes. Also, thanks to lots (and lots) of time spent pondering the issue, and to the extra stimulus provided by Mike Habib and Jon Conway's excellent guest posts, I've come to some unsettling questions that are still unresolved.

The Bad

1) Whither goest utility? - As I wrote way back in the halcyon days of...spring 2011, after I announced that I would relinquish the old pose and select a new one I got many requests that I refrain from this. Almost all of them were concerned with losing the ability to easily contrast my skeletals to others after the repose. I was (and am) sympathetic to that plight, and selected a pose that minimized the "damage".

Yet I also had a disconcerting realization: Both Greg Paul and myself had been varying the pose of the forelimbs for years and no one ever bothered to complain about the loss of utility. Sometimes we've both illustrated maniraptorans with the arms flexed into their folded-wing pose, sometimes not. Less advanced theropods obviously never adopted such a pose, so their arms often hang listlessly. My tyrannosaurs went from a similar "hanging out" pose to one that reflected the work done by Lipkin and Carpenter. Why was the issue never broached? Are forelimbs less important for comparative purposes than hind limbs? Or do we naturally gravitate towards the larger structure because of how our visual cortex's work? I don't know, but I'm unsatisfied by the discrepancy.

2) Is variety the spice of life? - Jon Conway also brought up a good point in his guest article, that there isn't a single pose that best serves every need. This is certainly true, and while I still feel that within groups making poses similar is useful, I also have to admit that in some ways the job has just begun.

3) That job has just begun - Oh yeah, and another thing. Turns out there are quadrupedal dinosaurs too. Who'd have thunk it, eh? Despite the obvious and objective superiority of theropods, prosauropods, and basal ornithiscians, there's still a lot of four-footed critters in my skeletal collection, and I'm going to have to come up with a pose for them as well. Two actually, since the graviportal species will need a pose that is different from the quadrupeds with flexed limbs. Ah well, that just means that 2012 will also need to have a Great Skeletal Repose as well.

An end and a beginning

So we've come full circle. I've adopted a pose for the bipedal dinosaurs, but still have to come up with (two!) new poses for quadrupeds. I still am very much interested in soliciting outside opinions on the subject, but I also want the blog to move back to posts about anatomy and reconstruction, rather than a continuing series of posts on the technical issues behind selecting a pose. So expect to see the occasional progress report on the quadrupeds, but don't expect it to dominate space on the blog this year.

If you have a strong opinion on the subject, don't hesitate to email me (or use that Gchat thing). In the mean time, I really do have a series of upcoming posts on Acrocanthosaurus and Spinosaurus anatomy, as well as the trials and tribulations of reconstructing skeletals in multiple views.

Stick around, won't you? 2012 should be an interesting year.

11 comments:

davidmaasJanuary 22, 2012 at 10:50 AM
Look forward to quads, and blog posts and ... whatever you come up with!
TomozaurusJanuary 22, 2012 at 2:19 PM
Exciting. Are we going to see the reposes up?
optimisticpainterJanuary 22, 2012 at 4:34 PM
I do like the new pose from an artist's perspective. The hyper-flexed 'standard', while dynamic, can distort the perception of proportions. It also lead me to personally try and use *any* other running position in my illustrations, as it became the norm as so many people reference Greg Paul's stuff.

So Scott, do your skeletals comprise of separate part in layers for easy modification?
Scott HartmanJanuary 22, 2012 at 8:19 PM
Thanks guys; the reposed skeletals will appear concurrently with the overhaul of my main website (skeletaldrawing.com), which is actually mostly done but requires some more testing to make sure the redirects work and other assorted web-wizardry that seems to take more time than I'd like.

@optimist - yes, my skeletals typically have between 25-40 layers, with the silhouette layer of course being the bottom one. I have to redraw parts of the silhouette anytime I repose a skeletal, but the individual bones can be transformed in Photshop (using the correct pivot point during rotations), which is not "easy" but a lot faster than redrawing them entirely.

Whenever people ask me for tips about doing skeletals in a computer, my advice is: "Get lots of RAM."
Alex HallJanuary 22, 2012 at 11:02 PM
New pose looks great! I can easily see the utility of an implied walking/strutting stance.
optimisticpainterJanuary 23, 2012 at 8:54 PM
Thanks Scott. Had a feeling there might be a few layers involved. I hope you have a decent naming convention to maintain your sanity!
Mike TaylorJanuary 24, 2012 at 1:24 AM
"Turns out there are quadrupedal dinosaurs too. Who'd have thunk it, eh? Despite the obvious and objective superiority of theropods, prosauropods, and basal ornithiscians ..."

There's a typo in your post: you misspelled "inferiority".

That aside, I think you've done a great job here. The walking pose is much more generally applicable than Greg Paul's running pose(tm)(R),(all rights reserved), and will I hope be swiftly and broadly adopted as "standard". It's a good choice for all the reasons you list.
Scott HartmanJanuary 24, 2012 at 11:21 AM
@Mike - That "typo" was inserted specifically with you in mind.

@Optimist - Yes, after the better part of two decades with Photoshop I obsessively name everything. Folders were also a huge help, as I can collapse 50+ layers into 4-5 related folders, which makes it easier to find the correct layer to work on (although I still sometimes screw that up).
Paul HeastonJanuary 26, 2012 at 10:00 AM
Thanks Scott-- fascinating insight into your process. If each bone (or all the ones you'd most likely have to move) is a separate layer in PS, are they raster-based or scalable vectors? It seems like moving (transforming) bones repeatedly would eventually degrade a raster image. Have you given any thought to doing them in Illustrator?
Scott HartmanJanuary 26, 2012 at 10:33 AM
Paul - You're correct that it's not every single bone, I only isolate single bones that are likely to move (e.g. the limbs), while say the dorsal vertebrae are kept as a functional unit (with the ribs on a separate layer on top of them).

As disk space and RAM have gotten cheap and plentiful I've been able to work at a high enough resolution that degradation is generally not a serious issue at print resolutions (let alone web use), but in the past I did indeed run into that problem.

I did also consider Illustrator for that reason, but in the end I decided against it as for me at least, I find I am less precise in my lines when using vector tools, and I want to create a literal representation of the bone outlines as much as possible.
Paul HeastonJanuary 26, 2012 at 5:51 PM
Thanks for the answer Scott!