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I've recently been re-working an old piece: belemnites of the Speeton Clay (click here), which was an identification plate style watercolour of three species of belemnites. I wanted to rework the piece into a life reconstruction.
To do this I used one of the photographs I had taken using my water tank (click here) as the background and composed the belemnites as a semi-transparent layer on top. The degree of transparency corresponded to where the belemnites were (e.g. the larger/closer the belemnite the less transparent). I also had to make a series of adjustments, such as adding shadow to the underside of the belemnites, as well as deforming some of the belemnite's arm positions to make each belemnite individual.
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| Reconstruction I. |
After my first reconstruction I attempted to portray two of the belemnites releasing ink, something that belemnites were known to do, based on the presence of fossil ink-sacs in some belemnite taxa. The ink is dark in colour, due to melanin, with the exact colour differing between different cephalopod groups. I decided to go with a brown-black similar to modern day cuttlefish. Creating realistic ink within water is a incredibly hard challenge. Simulating the movement of the surrounding water, the movement of the belemnite and how the ink disperses from the siphon is a near impossible task.
I was thinking of changing the composition, to try and make the piece more balanced, however, I liked the look of the ink covering the other belemnites and partially obscuring them.
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| Reconstruction II. |
After experimenting with inking belemnites, I wanted to experiment with some deformed ones, after a friend sent me a photo of one his specimens from the Speeton Clay that had an unusually deformed rostrum (a palaeopathological feature). Basing my reconstructions on a recent paper [1], I deformed the rostrums using photoshop and displayed them in the water column.
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| Belemnites with pathalogical deformations of the rostrum. |
Despite being a reworking of prior work, I was really happy with these pieces, especially the blending of the watercolour and the photographic elements. This also opens up new possibilities for watercolour/photograph reconstructions such as a 'belemnite battlefields' and orthocone nautiloids.
[1] Hoffmann, R., Stevens, K., Picollier, M.-C., Mutterlose, J., and Klug, C. 2020. Non-destructive analysis of pathological belemnite rostra by micro-CT techniques. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 65,11–27.
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