Without question, it is simply the best DVD in existence, for anyone who is just getting into dino drawing, but perhaps more so for the established artist seeking to bone up on various techniques.
Krentz is smart, and it shows in the way he organizes his presentation. He knows that everyone wants to immediately draw a cool dinosaur head, so he starts out demonstrating how to construct a convincing head by using basic geometric shapes and then matching points on those shapes to the details of an actual head in order to begin smoothing a series of cube and sphere shapes into something that looks like it could eat you. The particular anatomical hot spots include the articular surface of the jaw, the back of the skull, the orbit of the eye, the temporal fenestra, the anterior fenestra, the naries (nostrils), and the jugal. If you don’t know what a jugal is, join 99.5 percent of the world. If you do, consider this your no-prize (and most of us don’t believe you anyway … neener neener).
Krentz then breaks down the underlying structure of both carnivores and herbivores so that it seems quite natural when he then demonstrates how to draw them (using sketches and his own sets of sculptures) in various action poses. The DVD covers a wide range of topics from skeletal structures and muscles, to range of motion and the essential gestures of various kinds of dinosaurs and unique body types. In most cases, Krentz uses quick sketches to establish his material, but he also devotes much of the last quarter of the DVD contents to a detailed study of a carnivore’s head with eyes flaring, jaws open wide, and bits of spittle flying out …
… in other words, the stuff of major league nightmares.
As I hopefully implied above, there doesn’t seem to be a thing that the DVD’s author, David Krentz, doesn’t know about dinosaurs. He rolls out the Latin nomenclature like you or I would read the drive-thru menu at Mickey D’s. He is apparently on a first name basis with every paleontologist in the free world, which explains why he has been on expeditions to far away locales to assist with actual excavations and then has been invited back to the lab, so to speak, to help model the dinosaurs he so recently unearthed. He’s so good at deciphering how muscles and ligaments must have layered over bones and such, all of it fossilized, of course, that when it came time to develop the concepts behind the creatures in Disney’s epic "Dinosaur", Krentz only had to vaguely apply for the job (actually, Krentz was working at Disney when the project was started and because it represented the opportunity of a lifetime, he literally wrestled senior staffers onto the ground and wouldn't let go until they agreed to let him work on it; only a slight exaggeration, trust me).
Put simply, as an artist, Krentz is really good, but as an artist drawing dinosaurs, he's as s-s-s-scary as they are … and that's scary good, of course.
If the DVD has any drawback at all it is that Krentz is drawing at double his normal speed. While the trained artist may not have a problem with this, anyone new to the field will instantly have "speed envy" and may be tempted to commit suupoku with a #2 pancil.
That being said, if you're only going to invest in one DVD about dinosaur sketching, Drawing Dinosaurs: Anatomy and Sketching is the one. And while there is no indication that either Krentz or the DVD will become extinct anytime soon, you might want to secure this one for your collection before The Gnomon Workshop has to be excavated from beneath a mountain of orders.
