It was like art school under a shotgun with a paycheck. Bakshi gave me a chance as a background painter, even though I didn’t know much about the business. The studio was staffing up for an animated sword and sorcery film called “Fire and Ice”. Then I stumbled into Ralph Bakshi Productions. I thought my art career was over at age 21. I was okay at drawing, but had never really painted. None of them wanted to hire me, and my portfolio was not too impressive anyway. I made cold calls to all the animation studios I could think of: Disney, Bluth and Hanna-Barbera. It wasn’t so easy! I couldn’t find work in the freelance world. My plan was to find an art job to pay off her loans, whilst I crib off of her class notes. Here was my situation: I was broke, my fiancée wanted to finish art school, and I already had a college degree (in archaeology). How did you get the job and what did you learn from that experience? You told us you had to drop out of art school because you got a job working in the movie industry as a background painter. I was thrilled when Mike curated the Dinotopia exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History. One of the first paleontologists to help me out was Mike Brett-Surman of the Smithsonian Museum, who shared my love of both science and science fiction. One of them was called “Dinosaur Parade.” The idea was to reimagine dinosaurs, not just as monsters or dull sluggards in the swamp, but to pick up on what Bakker and Horner were proposing about caregiving and warm- bloodedness. I combined those interests with my love of Jules Verne by coming up with a series of lost world panoramas in my spare time. I worked for National Geographic all through the 1980s, painting archaeological reconstructions for them, while painting paperback covers for science fiction novels.

I ended up majoring in archaeology at University of California at Berkeley, and, even then, I was working with archaeologists and paleontologists to reconstruct lost worlds.

I have been fascinated with archaeology since I was a little kid by reading old copies of National Geographic. What initially inspired you to draw and paint dinosaurs? You are very well-known for authoring and illustrating the multiple award-winning Dinotopia series, in which dinosaurs and humans live harmoniously in a symbiotic society. Award-winning illustrator and painting blogger James Gurney discusses drawing dinosaurs, artistic advice, “fruit salad disease”, and the peculiar ways his painting sessions have been interrupted in the newest Pentalic blog.

James gurney national geographic