The boys and I found a neat website that taught you how to draw dinosaurs one step at a time. Here’s the step-by-step way to draw a Tyrannosaurus rex, and my attempt at doing so. (See? I am overcoming my art phobia! <g>):

Ok, so it’s not perfect, but I am quite pleased with it. It’s clearly not a generic dino, not a Triceratops, a Stegosaurus, or anything else. It’s a T rex!

Here’s Gareth’s T rex, who he said is lying down and sleeping:

These step-by-step drawings were clearly a bit much for him. Daegan, on the other hand, while also finding them challenging, did his best to follow the instructions and pay attention to detail. Here’s my favourite of his works, a Quetzalcoatlus, alongside the original:

Note the white ‘fur’ on the body (made from the fluffy bits of Q-tips), as many palaeontologists think Quetzy, as he is known in our house, may have had fur. (Anyone know why Daegan often flipped the orientation of his drawings, making them in mirror image to the original?)

And here’s 3 others, which suffer a bit from being crammed on the same page (but my suggestions of one creature per page, or starting a new page, were met with “Why? There’s lots of space right here!” Sigh. Not life-threatening, not morally threatening…let it go. <g>). In order, here’s velociraptor, oviraptor, and archaeopteryx:

The other dino art we did yesterday came from a game Daegan made up. He took all our dinosaur magnets off the fridge, and put them in a bag. “Let me teach a class,” he said. “I’ll teach you how to draw a dinosaur. First, you have to close your eyes and reach into the bag. Pull out a dino, but don’t look at it, and keep your eyes closed and count to 10. Now look at it and trace the outside to get its shape. Then there are three steps.

“First, you draw the skeleton (and he brought over a picture of the skeleton from one of his many dinosaur books so you had a model). Then, you draw on its muscles. Last, you colour on its skin, or sometimes feathers.”

I played the game once, making an apatosaurus (the dino we all used to call brontosaurus growing up). Other than not quite understanding why I needed to keep my eyes closed and count to 10, I thought it was a neat game!