Camping with Dinosaurs (a.k.a. Guess Who is coming for Dinner?)

Cassandra Högfeldt in the Cavewoman genre picture Camping with Dinosaurs.

Camping with Dinosaurs is my first Cavewoman genre photo composite. I have made a number of pictures in the genre before, but they have been all 3D, with 3D characters I have customized using Daz Studio.

Thanks to a recent photo session with model Cassandra Högfeldt, it was possible to create the picture photographically.

I had created a storyboard for the picture that we used when discussing the picture before we shot it.

Dakotaraptor Attack, the storyboard for Camping with Dinosaurs.

Where do you get the idea for a picture like this? Well, Edgar Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan started it with his 1913 novel The Cave Girl.

The Cave Girl is available as a free download at The Gutenberg Project.

The Cave Girl features brutish stone-age cave-men, and prehistoric monsters on a remote, very isolated island. No dinosaurs though. for those, we'll jump to 1993, and the comic artist and writer Budd Root.

In December 1993, Basement Comics released Cavewoman #1, featuring the heroine Meriem C. Cooper. The comic was created by Budd Root, who has credited the comic Little Annie Fanny, and paleontological artist William Stout as the inspiration for Meriem and her adventures.

It is worth noting that the director of the 1933 King Kong was Merian C. Cooper. It is funny, but I have never seen anything written about the similarity to Meriem C. Cooper. It seems like Budd Root paid homage to a major source of inspiration, and then didn't talk about it much.

Meriem Cooper was born in 1980, but through time travel, she ended up alone 65 million years back in time. Well, not completely alone, there is Klyde, a 5m tall genetically enhanced gorilla with an extremely bad temper.

Thus, the scene was set for a series of comics about a young woman adventuring in the Cretaceous period. Eventually, more time-travellers arrived, and the stories got a larger gallery of characters.

Burroughs and Root are the most direct influences on Camping with Dinosaurs. Of course, every Lost World genre book I've read, from Arthur Conan Doyles's The Lost World to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, and movies from King Kong and onwards, have also been strong influences.

If you want to see how the scene was built up using a mix of photography and 3D, have a look at my post at ArtStation.

Now, I'm going back to making more pictures.

Be seeing you!