Todd Marshall Paleo Art - Planet Dinosaur

Todd Marshall Paleo Art Pages

Homepage > Paleo Artists > Todd Marshall Paleo Art

Tood Marshall Paleo Illustrator "You're going to be an artist." That's what my father told me at our kitchen table, when I was about out of high school, and I had just informed him I was going to be a rock star!
Well as it turned out, my father had some insight and I had some wild dreams. That was in 1986. I moved to L.A. soon after that and gave my dreams a shot. I did well in the rock-n-roll scene, but by some strange fortune I started painting album covers for some of the biggest rock bands in town. Every band from Motley Crue, W.A.S.P., L.A. Guns to Kix! This was pretty wild considering I had never had an art class in my life! Art just came kind-of naturally to me. I fell in love with the airbrush, then it was all over. Art was in my veins, and it was much more lucrative than singing in a band!

I worked for years doing my art for various record labels and rock clubs in L.A. I started to get pretty tired of the politics. I wanted to expand my horizons. I started tattooing for a few years and painting motorcycle tanks for the Hells Angels in my spare time. I got pretty tired of that also after a while. With the help of my wife, I decided to enroll in a very prestiges art school in Pasadena called Art Center College of Design.

That was the best move I had ever made! While getting to really dive deep into art of all types, I also got to get back to the core of who I felt I really was! I met a lot of great artists there, but a big turning point was when I was introduced to one of my art heroes, Mark "Crash" McCreery, head designer at Stan Winston Special Effects Studios. He did all the designs for the dinosaurs in the motion pictures, Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park II. Crash was, and still is a great inspiration to me, as a colleague and great friend.

Well that got me back to painting what I love the most, the drawing and painting of prehistoric animals. I can remember I could draw a Brontosaurus before I could even write my name! For my entire life I studied paleo-life and loved everything about them. So that's what I do in my spare time now. Full time I've been working as an Art Director and Lead Artist in Digital Game Studios.

I'm a great fan of nature and living things and their relationships with one another. I always look for this kind of relationship in my compositions in my paleo-illustration. I would recommend to anyone interested in doing paleo-art, really studying the anatomy and skeletal constructions of past and present animals. How muscles and bones work together. Study environments, faunas in all regions and areas. Most of all love and believe in what you are doing! Hey, people will believe in you, if you believe in yourself!

Albertosaurus | Ankylosaurus | Apatosaurus