Jurassic Key Moments Illustrations
Well over a year ago, I had the opportunity to create illustrations of 4 "key moments" from the Jurassic franchise. The ask was to create illustrations that were single-color, yet true to form and somewhat realistic. Ty Mattson, creative director on the project, did some great sketches to build the overall composition. There wasn't exact photographic reference for any of these, and two didn't have any photographic reference at all (since Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom hadn't yet come out). So I had to create much of this from scratch, using a few pieces of concept art from Universal — and whatever images I could scrounge up on Google — to help give me an idea what the characters and dinosaurs looked like.
Client: Universal
Creative Director: Ty Mattson (Mattson Creative)
Sketches: Ty Mattson
Illustrations: Russ Gray.
Project Completed: January – April of 2018
Original Sketches by Ty Mattson. Normally I'm not provided sketches for illustrations I do, let alone sketches that are this good. It was fun to execute these.
From there I tried a technique I had never done before (and frankly, kind of made up; I think). I created all the illustrations in grayscale, simply working with values. Then I added a base of color by placing a single solid color overlay layer (full coverage) and then used a "Color Balance" Adjustment Layer in Photoshop to add more variety: highlights shifted in one color direction, mids in another, and shadows yet another. I then added a handful of other adjustment layers to fine tune. But all coloring was achieved through adjustment layers only. Something I had never tried! (And may or may not use again! It wasn't easy). But it was fun and interesting to see some unexpected results as I went along.
