Sam Arthur has been writing things for about as long as I've known him. His main outlet is blogging (currently at Things I Like), but he's also contributed scripts for some of my video series (most notably The Murkum Show), and more recently he's self-published a couple of books of his other work.
I was asked if I'd create the cover artwork for Sam's first book, a collection of his short stories, before he'd settled on which of the stories the book would take its title from, so I've got a collection of sketches of proposed covers based on a range of different titles. In the end, the one that he went with was Tyrannosaur, the longest story in the book (and probably the best in my opinion), which retells the events of Jurassic Park from the perspective of the T-Rex.
With this in mind, I drew an image which echoes the dinosaur-egg-hatching scene from the film, with the important addition that the baby dinosaur is holding a pen, intended to reflect the fact that it's the one who'll be telling the story. Since T-Rex has infamously tiny and underdeveloped arms, I was faced with the interesting question of how you'd go about holding a pen if you only had two digits per hand - I can't find any pictures of my experiments (although I'm sure I took some), but I did figure out by trial and error how you could do it, and I took care to draw the emerging baby predator with its fingers wrapped around its biro in what I'd figured out would be the optimal way - or at least the closest to an optimal way that exists under those conditions.
You can buy the book at www.amazon.co.uk/Tyrannosaur-Samuel-R-Arthur/dp/1796498246.
Tyrannosaur was followed by a second volume, this time of poetry, titled The Ducks!
