Struthiosaurus austriacus - Abstract Cover

Finally able to share this one!
This illustration was done as the cover artwork for the abstract journal of the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft in Vienna, Austria (https://palges2021.univie.ac.at/en/). It took me quite a while to finish and even longer to stay quiet about.

The animal depicted, Struthiosaurus austriacus, was a small nodosaurid ankylosaur from Central Europe and was found in Muthmannsdorf, Lower Austria, roughly an hour south of Vienna, in a now closed off coal mine.

The model itself has a relatively long history, with its first iterations being done in 2014/2015, then redone for my BSc thesis in 2016 and being changed a few times until 2021. This must be version five at this point. It was sculpted and rendered in Zbrush, retopologised in TopoGun 2.0, brought into Photoshop for combining the render passes and to add the photobashed matte painting background/backdrop. All of that was then painted over with light correction and added details, like the pterosaurs flying overhead.