From Sketch to painting: “Ultra-sketches”

Back in the days when I used to do all my prehistoric scenes in oils, it was of the essence that my sketches were quite precise and detailed, because once you start painting with the brush on the canvas, there is little room for improvisation. Of course you can change your mind and hide the old dry paint under fresh layers of oils but the process is time-consuming to say the least -for me it was usually pure agony to incorporate any substantial changes to an ongoing oil painting.
Painstakingly detailed sketches were created by classic masters of paleoart, especially by Rudolph Zallinger whose scale color sketches for the Yale Peabody Museum murals were so detailed that Time magazine published them as if they were finished illustrations in the form of large, several-pages-wide folds. Many of us grew believing that they were the finished museum murals.
I have created especially accurate pencil sketches not only to define all the details -and thus pave the way for the process of painting- but also because in some occasions I didn’t expect to get there to the exhibition opening deadline, and the exhibits designers needed something to show in the meantime.
That was the case with a series of large oil paintings I did several years ago for the Altamira Museum in Northern Spain. One of them was a scene set in the early Pleistocene at Koobi Fora in Northern Kenya. My pencil sketch was more detailed than I would normally do, so it could take the place of the color version until the latter was finally completed.

Here is the detailed pencil sketch…

And here is the finished oil painting of the Koobi Fora scene.