Dinosaur Rider - And some reflections on Fine Art Nude

Dinosaur Rider II - A storyboard for a picture I plan to shoot in 2018.

I have wanted to make Fine Art Nude pictures for a couple of years now. I have done it only once or twice, because it is a difficult genre, both technically, and emotionally.

Fine Art Nude is not quite what you expect if you just look at some Fine Art Nude pictures, even very good ones. If you look at FAN pictures at 1x.com, for example, you will see almost exclusively women, in aesthetically pleasing poses. Quite often, light and shadows are used used to accentuate shapes.

Creating FAN art this way works very well, and that is why that style is so popular. However, if we look at a definition of Fine Art Nude, as a genre, it becomes obvious that there are many other ways of creating FAN art, without breaking the genre boundaries:

Fine art nude photography is a genre of fine-art photography which depicts the nude human body with an emphasis on form, composition, emotional content, and other aesthetic qualities.
- Nude Photography Art, Wikipedia

Note the complete absence of anything in the definition that prevents dinosaurs from being in the picture. As with many other things, what is not there, may be at least as important as what is there.

Emphasis on form and composition? Well, if you look at the composition of the picture above, you will notice two things: The picture does use triangle composition, and there is room for improvement. That is okay. I'll let this picture rest for a bit, work on some other stuff, and then go back to it, to see what I can improve. That's okay. I am focusing on learning new tools at the moment. Integrating the new things I learn with everything I already know, comes later.

Emotional content? Well, we interpret what we see differently. I see a woman strong and skilled enough to control the (at least symbolically) strongest and fiercest predator that has ever walked the Earth. And, she does it naked, with no tools, no constraints on the T-Rex, other than the bond she has created by training it, and her will.

To me, that carries a lot of emotional content.

BTW, here is an earlier version of the same picture.

Brighter, and toned to give an afternoon, rather than evening feeling. I prefer the darker version, but that is a matter of taste and context.

I am working on more Dinosaur Rider pictures. I have four planned so far, and there might be more. The second one is already done, and the third is rendering as I write this.