more prints

Here's the second of my dinosaur series of block prints. It's not actually a dinosaur, but a marine reptile commonly called a Plesiosaur. These creatures ranged in size from 3 to 12 meters in length, and had amazingly long necks as well as four paddle-shaped limbs.

One of the reasons I started doing these prints is because I felt a sort of kinship with fossil preparators carefully carving away the rock to reveal the specimen. The process of carving to reveal an image really captured my imagination and I was particularly interested in portraying skeletons as they appear on site, rather than the fully articulated and assembled pictures we usually see. This image is more of a compromise, mostly because the neck was so long it had to be curled around to fit on the paper.

I did two different versions of the print, one without a background color, and one with a background that I printed with a rather beat up piece of wood to give some texture. They're available at my Etsy store.