Paleoart is a thing. Drawing and coloring dinosaurs isn't an activity relegated to children and their coloring books. I took some time with the kids to talk about how there are people who's job it is to draw, paint and sculpt dinosaurs for books and exhibits in museums. We discussed how they work closely with paleontologists and use scientific knowledge to create realistic pictures of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. 

Draw a fossil

• Get a fossil, or a fossil replica and put it on the table.
• Everyone draw it from their own angle.

Draw a dino

• find a model - a toy dinosaur, an image from a dinosaur book, your imagination
• draw a dinosaur and try to be as realistic as possible
• For younger paleoartists, use realistically drawn coloring pages - make guesses about what colors the dinosaurs were.

Dinorama

• Grab some toy plastic dinosaurs of the realistic variety
• Set them up outside, or even create your own backdrop
• Try to create a scene that tells some kind of story
• Take pictures of the creation​

Coloring pages - a good coloring page can serve as a launching pad for some imaginative work. By removing the pressure of drawing a realistic dinosaur, you can focus on ideas like imaging what color they might have been, what type of skin, fur, or feathers they had. Did they have stripes? Spots? 

Drawing of a mosasaurus. One of the fossils found in the dig activity was a mosasaurus tooth. Used that as a model for the teeth in the drawing.

A drawing of a spinosaurus. Teeth also inspired from a tooth found in a 'dig'

okay - this one I did - sometimes you just have to goof around too.

Dinrama ... Velociraptor versus a young triceratops.