Voices of Palaeoart - Maija Karala
Our latest iteration of the ‘Voices of Palaeoart’ series, where we interview palaeoartists to hear about their motivations and creative processes. In this post, we feature Maija Karala! A skillful artist and palaeo-enthusiast, you can find more of her fantastic work on Twitter and DeviantArt!
What medium of palaeoart do you create?
“I mostly do digital art these days. Occasionally I dig up my markers and brush pens, but it’s been a while since I made anything serious on paper.”
What was your impetus for getting into Palaeoart?
“As a teenager, I drew mostly fantasy creatures. Dragons, griffins, elves... When I started studying biology at university, I wanted to draw something that was based on science but still retained an element of imagination that illustrating living animals doesn’t have. That is how I landed on paleoart and have been doing it ever since.”
How long have you been involved with Palaeoart?
“Nearly 15 years. Originally I was just doing it for fun, not thinking I would ever draw professionally. That happened mostly by accident.”
What is your research process when setting out to reconstruct an animal or setting?
“It very much depends on the animal or scene and on the time I have in my hands. Lack of time is my greatest enemy! If I don’t have a time constraint, I love doing thorough research. I often start from Wikipedia to get a general handle on the taxon or formation (it’s surprisingly good on many prehistoric topics) and then move on to reading technical and semitechnical literature, taking notes, collecting a folder of photos of fossils and skeletal reconstructions, checking if I can find any 3D models to look at. Photos of real animals and environments is also an important part of my process: it helps keep me rooted in reality and not flying off into depicting fantasy creatures. With Pleistocene animals, it’s generally much easier to keep a level of realism than with non-avian dinosaurs or other animals of a more distant past that don’t have close living relatives.
In reality, projects like this often wait for months or years before I have the time for them. I often have to cut corners a bit and do less research and planning than I would like to, in order to get something actually done.”
What do you do when the information is lacking - say a species has no information about certain key morphological features. How do you go about reconstructing it?
“Phylogenetic bracketing is a friend. I’ll look at the closest known relatives in which the particular feature is known, and then make a decision whether to copy the feature from related species or make up something that’s similar but not exactly the same. Or, if someone whose expertise I trust has already done that, I’ll often follow their example. Some reconstructions are necessarily more speculative than others, and that’s all right.”
Fig 1. A diagram showing the different colourschemes of the Eurasian Wild Horse (Equus ferus) and the accompanying alleles of each
What is your artistic process when doing a piece? Any particular inspirations among other palaeoartists or artists in general?
“My artistic process varies wildly. I might be making multiple sketches, trying to find a nice composition and palette, starting over three or four times. Or I might just start doodling during a virtual meeting and accidentally end up with something I want to finish. Sometimes anatomy and perspective comes naturally and easily, on other days it’s about as smooth as trying to walk waist-deep in tar. But I guess that’s just how being an artist is.
In any case, important aspects of my artistic process include deciding what I want to say with the image. Paleoart is always a hypothesis, an illustration about ideas concerning prehistoric life and nature in general. I’m often exploring ways to depict nature untouched by humans. It’s hard to get rid of the mental images of planted, uniformly aged forests and vegetation that hasn’t felt the trunk of an elephant in millennia. I also think of what idea of nature I want to show: I often opt to depict peaceful scenes of resting, feeding, socializing or travelling instead of the dramatic violent moments so popular in documentaries and paleoart. They are cool of course but overrepresented to a degree that people often have a biased idea of what wild animal lives are actually like. And I think of the individual animal I’m depicting. A horse, for example, is never just a horse. It’s male or female, old or young, bold or shy, happy, relaxed, nervous or sad. And if you know horses, you can tell all these things by the little details of their anatomy and body language.
There are many amazing paleoartists out there. Many of them (way too many to mention here) have inspired me over the years or offered great critique. I’d like to mention Douglas Henderson for his wonderfully wild environments, John Conway for beautiful landscapes and fascinatingly unusual reconstructions, Natee Himmapaan for incredible attention to detail, and specifically on Pleistocene topics, Mauricio Antón and Tom Björklund.
There is so much to learn in paleoart, and it’s much easier when you don’t have to learn alone. From Ville Sinkkonen, who happens to be my spouse, I have learned much about animal anatomy and gotten tons of artistic advice. Beyond the Paleo, a Facebook group founded by Joschua Knüppe, has gotten me to seriously look at non-paleo work for inspiration and learning, which is something I had previously neglected. People like Raven Amos, Rebecca Groom and Natalia Jagielska have shown me that great paleoart can be made in many styles and techniques.”
Which piece portraying the Pleistocene are you most proud of?
“Recently, I have learned much about painting, but haven’t yet gotten many chances to apply these skills to Pleistocene subjects, so I’m now slightly unhappy with nearly all of them. I think my favourites would be the Late Pleistocene rhino reconstructions.”
Fig 2. Depictions of the two Late Pleistocene species of Stephanorhinus and their respective ranges
Are you involved in any projects you would like to tell people about?
“I’m currently working on my first book, which is really cool. It’s going to be the first ever Simple Finnish book on dinosaurs and other Mesozoic life, with all new illustrations. I have several personal projects I’m quite excited about but haven’t been able to work on for a while. These include a series on Late Pleistocene rhinos and their distributions, on the diversity of horses during the last glaciation, and “The Wilder North” which is a whimsical idea of a world where the Pleistocene megafauna never went extinct and all the big animals live alongside humans.”
Finally, what is your alltime favourite animal?
“Oh, that’s hard! I have been fascinated by all animals since before I could read. I love all things Late Pleistocene, since they are so fantastical but separated from us just by just a heartbeat of geological time. Another favourite would be all the weird Triassic reptiles of a world recovering from mass extinction. Closer to home, I’m very fond of rats – they are a prime example of the emotional and cognitive depth, personality and intelligence of even the smallest mammals. I have seven of them.”
