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Description
Waaaay back in the mid-to-late 1990's, when I was a youngun, just getting started in my career, my first pieces of published art were Dinosaur illustrations, appearing in children's books and small circulation magazines.
Most of this stuff was for Mike Frederick's "Prehistoric Times" magazine and then, later, for a nice little publisher in Century City, California called RGA Lowell House. (RGA doesn't exist anymore, but at the time it was located right across the street from the Nakatomi Plaza building from the original Die Hard movie! Being a Midwest kid who had just moved to California... I was starstruck.)
I think some of this work may have also been reprinted later in either a Random House or Harper Collins book or two. I can't remember anymore... Pretty sure one of those big companies took over RGA at some point.

My "Dino Art Years" were 1996-1999. After 1999 I started getting work in Television Animation, and stopped doing the Dinosaur Illustration stuff. But recently, I found a whole box of these drawings in my closet and thought it would be fun to add them to my Deviant Art Gallery. Just for nostalgia's sake.

Fun Fact for you internet generation kids: Back in the late 90's, there was still no such thing as sending the publisher your work electronically (or at least, most average people didn't have that capability yet). You had to pack your original art that you had just spent months working on, into a box and deliver it to the publisher. That always used to make me soooo nervous. And then, if you were lucky, a few months later they (might) give (most of) that original art back to you.
So, I learned, upon completing every job, to make a final trip to Kinko's (usually in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn, exhausted and sleep-deprived), to make good clean Xerox copies of everything, before sending it out. Just in case.
As a matter of fact, most of the images you see here were scanned from very old Xerox copies rather than the "lost??" originals.
To be fair, I should add that I never had those "oops we lost it" problems with the magazines. Some of the book publishers could be bad about it, though.
Still, no hard feelings. That was a long time ago, and those publishers gave me work and paid me to draw dinosaurs at a time when I was young and struggling to make a living doing art, and hungry just to get my artwork in print and seen anywhere... Oh, you kids today don't know how good you got it with sites like Deviant Art and all these online options to give you exposure!!! Haha.

Anyway... Good times...
Enjoy this little glimpse into my professional art prehisotry!

Description
Waaaay back in the mid-to-late 1990's, when I was a youngun, just getting started in my career, my first pieces of published art were Dinosaur illustrations, appearing in children's books and small circulation magazines.
Most of this stuff was for Mike Frederick's "Prehistoric Times" magazine and then, later, for a nice little publisher in Century City, California called RGA Lowell House. (RGA doesn't exist anymore, but at the time it was located right across the street from the Nakatomi Plaza building from the original Die Hard movie! Being a Midwest kid who had just moved to California... I was starstruck.)
I think some of this work may have also been reprinted later in either a Random House or Harper Collins book or two. I can't remember anymore... Pretty sure one of those big companies took over RGA at some point.

My "Dino Art Years" were 1996-1999. After 1999 I started getting work in Television Animation, and stopped doing the Dinosaur Illustration stuff. But recently, I found a whole box of these drawings in my closet and thought it would be fun to add them to my Deviant Art Gallery. Just for nostalgia's sake.

Fun Fact for you internet generation kids: Back in the late 90's, there was still no such thing as sending the publisher your work electronically (or at least, most average people didn't have that capability yet). You had to pack your original art that you had just spent months working on, into a box and deliver it to the publisher. That always used to make me soooo nervous. And then, if you were lucky, a few months later they (might) give (most of) that original art back to you.
So, I learned, upon completing every job, to make a final trip to Kinko's (usually in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn, exhausted and sleep-deprived), to make good clean Xerox copies of everything, before sending it out. Just in case.
As a matter of fact, most of the images you see here were scanned from very old Xerox copies rather than the "lost??" originals.
To be fair, I should add that I never had those "oops we lost it" problems with the magazines. Some of the book publishers could be bad about it, though.
Still, no hard feelings. That was a long time ago, and those publishers gave me work and paid me to draw dinosaurs at a time when I was young and struggling to make a living doing art, and hungry just to get my artwork in print and seen anywhere... Oh, you kids today don't know how good you got it with sites like Deviant Art and all these online options to give you exposure!!! Haha.

Anyway... Good times...
Enjoy this little glimpse into my professional art prehisotry!