Drawing T-Rex Playing American Football

Here is a recent drawing that was done as part of a project for a children’s book. I needed to create a group of young, anthropomorphic dinosaurs with various interests. Here is the athletic Tyrannosaurus of the group.

Initial Sketch of T-Rex

Although I liked general idea and the head, I wasn’t really happy with the rotation of the hips or the length of the body. Also, it seemed to be lacking some energy. So I tried another sketch taking those factors into account.

Refined Sketch

Here I focused on the parts of the sketch that I was most interested in changing, so I only roughed in the head and rear leg. I rotated the drawing to give it more energy as well. The head is still be a bit large… but I might leave it since he’s supposed to be pretty young, and T-Rex’s do have huge heads!

Ink Outline

Here I started to ink the outline of my T-Rex along with a few spotted blacks. Since this piece was done digitally, it’s simulated ink of course. I tried to emulate the line thickness created by a brush such as the Windsor-Newton series that is often favored by comic illustrators.

Before coloring in the picture, I decided to give it more of a comic book feel by inking in some additional texture and shading.

Texture Inking

I tried not to overdo it and left large areas of the head and tail open for color. I also wanted to keep the image as simple as possible. The next step was to add some basic colors.

Colors

I’m not sure why I went with red, other than my son’s favorite T-Rex toy is that color. The various characters in the story will all be different colors, so I decided to start with red for my athletic T-Rex. I kept the image very simple and only used flat colors with some shadows.

To make the image pop off the page a bit I decided put in a ring outline with the closer elements of the image breaking out.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed seeing the process I went through in creating this drawing.

This image is available on T-Shirts and other items on my RedBubble shop . If you like the image and would like to support this project, please check it out.