The Twighlight Zone

I was watching NOVA a couple weeks ago and they had an episode about parallel universes. But, some times I think parallel universes exist within the same universe. For example, I have empiric evidence that for every illustrator there is a musician with exact same name. Look at these examples:

David Ball vs David Ball
Chuck Pyle vs Chuck Pyle
Jonathan Colton vs Jonathan Coulton
Jeff Carter vs Jeff Carter
Ed Davenport vs Ed Davenport
Scott Franson vs Scott Franson
Mark Schultz vs Mark Schultz

Can there be any rationale explanation for this? Does your name determine your destiny? Are people with certain names driven towards creative endeavors? And why does it have to be country music of all things?!

Dino Sketch!

So, I've got this great idea for a new comic I want to create, and I think to myself "this sounds like a lot of fun" so I want to write, pencil and ink the book myself. Problem is, it's about dinosaurs and it occurs to me that I don't draw a lot of dinosaurs. As a matter of fact, I've never drawn a dinosaur. Seems weird to me that you can go to art school and graduate with a diploma without having ever drawn a single dinosaur. Sure, I've got sketchbooks of figure drawings from the floor to my shoulders, but not one dino drawing to be found.

So, what's a guy to do? I turn to my heroes. In this case it's Mark Schultz and Mitch Byrd, both are great illustrators, but more importantly they know their way around dinosaurs. So, I find a couple of drawings I like and copy them. These sketch studies took about 10 minutes each. Now my blood is pumped and ready to draw more dinos. My next stop is trying to find a good book for dinosaur reference. Any ideas?

The only dino illustrators I really know are from comics - Mark Schultz, Mitch Byrd, Frank Cho, and William Stout. Am I leaving anybody out? After that I'm probably headed to the Academy of Sciences to see what sort of dinosaur stuff, I can did up there. Also, any other good natural history museums in the Bay Area.

I have to add, dinosaurs are built much like humans. It's just a question of knowing your way around the bones - and then using your knowledge of "stretch and squeeze". I guess art school was good for something after all.