Stormy Skies

To us, sauropod dinosaurs seem almost unthinkably large, but even they were dwarfed by other natural elements in their environment - the forests and the weather. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while now, and finally got it done. At 2.30 am last night, to be specific.

A herd of Mamenchisaurus are browsing at the edge of a stand of early Sequoia-like conifers in the evening sun, somewhere in what is now China, around the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary. On the horizon, there's a storm coming.

This is inspired by the weather we had in Finland last spring. There were moments of sunny weather with very dark clouds approaching. They would spew down either rain, hail, sleet, or a combination of those, and after a while it would be sunny - again and again, some ten times a day. It was really weird, leaving home to walk in the sunshine and photograph flowers and butterflies, see a few of these cycles, and get back home through several centimeters of wet snow or a layer of hail. On one such walk, I took nice pictures of white gulls against an ink-blue hail cloud, quite similar to the pterosaurs here.

Black markers on a sketchbook page and Photoshop.