Interested in getting the word out to potential artists on how to accurately recreate your favourite prehistoric animal?
Tried of seeing the same recylced, tired, and unsupported concepts (aka palaeo-art memes) in palaeo-art?
See something wrong here in the database and want to help us correct it?
Fantastic! The Palaeo-art database needs your help!!! We take articles/briefs/kits from anyone and everyone who wants to help out the project. We are also looking for blog members who are keen on helping us get the facts of palaeontology out to artists!
What is the layout of an ideal post?
We offer only scientific information
Our only prerequisite for our briefs/kits/posts is that they are all based solely on academic peer reviewed research. Sadly no personal research, opinions, or hunches will be accepted here on the PAD. Not as an insult to your abilities or knowledge. We just feel peer reviewed work is the only we can present to artists as factually supported. Educated conjecture while being, yes, more plausible, is still frankly no more accurate than fanciful conjecture.
Also because we are presenting facts on the PAD, citing specific papers ensures all our posts are accurate even if the information in them becomes dated. If you cite the current understanding about X, but tomorrow X is proven to actually be Y, then we're okay because your post is clearly looking at research written when X was X.
We are user friendly
Despite the use of academic papers, we want this site to be totally accessible to any lay artist or person who visits. So we want articles to not rely on complex technical terms or concepts. Rather we want the content to be very approachably. The idea is we are breaking down a paper into its most key points so that an artist can understand them, and then in turn pass the science onto the general public. If the artist understood the technical lingo in the first place they'd probably already be using the technical literature!
While it is tempting to go into all the fascinating details of a paper, we are hoping to present only the concepts relevant to creating art of the organism in question. We do not want too much taxonomy, systematics, or other conceptual parts of the science as they do not have any effect on visually recreating a creature. We want anatomy, fossil evidence of behaviour, inferences offered by taphonomy, palaeo-ecology information, and things that bring the prehistoric past back to life! (Simplifed taxonomy and systematics ARE cool if they are relevant to concepts important to artists... let's face it though, most of the time they are not)
Credit is Essential
As all our posts are based on academic pieces we expect full referencing of ideas and information, not only for the accuracy issue discussed earlier, but because someone worked hard to find that stuff out and they deserve to be acknowledged.
Also because PAD is run by artists for artists (hopefully with a ton of help from scientists and sciency people) we expect full crediting of pictures and diagrams used in posts as well. The artist took the time to make the image, the least we can do is hattip to them publicly!
So we credit and cite whereever and whenever possible!
Put these all together, and what do you get?
A Palaeo-art Database post!!!
Posts for our site can take any form you like, so long as they follow these 3 criteria. Presenting peer-reviewed research, is approachable and non-technical, and cites and credits all information and art used.
So if you have a brief/kit/post for us, please send it our way at artevolved@gmail.com.
