Fun with Fossils

Welcome back. I wanted to continue a bit regarding the web site, which is now up and running at about 95%. I still have some tweaking to do, but I'm pretty happy with it. The fossil background was also done by Justin Gerard of Portland Studios. While we focused much effort on the Garden of Eden landing page, the fossil page is important because it's the background for all the other pages in the SamBatterman.com experience. 

First off, I wanted this background to scream controversy!

Wayback is about a group of scientists visiting the Antediluvian world. The Great Flood is anathema to the scientific establishment. So, I wanted the background to be a mixture of things that should not go together.

The background for the piece that I gave to Portland was a fossilized dinosaur or trilobite along with ancient Sumerian stone tablets and modern technology that was left behind by our travelers.

Here is the stream of Justin's thoughts during his creation of this piece...

...I am exploring this strata, and I find this ancient Sumerian writing, Wow, that's exciting, so I keep going, expecting maybe to find more writing, or ceramics or something, when whoa I find dinosaur bones, which shouldn't be here in this period of strata, so that is kinda weird. So I keep going, and as I chip away a bit more rock falls off to reveal a petrified circuit board in the midst of all this.  Which is of course, really really strange.  And so the image, is trying to catch the moment of profound strangeness that I as an paleontologist would be feeling as I see this, the very moment after I have uncovered this circuit board within it...

I think his thought process says it all. Here's the progression of the idea...

The things I wanted to include in the composition:

Justin's first cut at fusing multiple things together using Photoshop...

First sketch...

Final...

I hope you enjoyed this fun ride. You can download this artwork on my author site, www.sambatterman.com. Just flip the pages of the book to Downloads and follow the instructions there. You can also download Dan Bressler's soundtrack.

Blessings,

Sam