The Dodo Blog

Beautiful black & white picture of a Dodo statue by David Champion, aka, biker500, with a pinhole camera.

Well it’s what they think a Dodo looks like round here. Pinhole image on 135 Rollei Retro 100. Six second exposure.

I don’t care much for auction, unless is something really impressive, like the image above: A dodo. Yes, a dodo, but not a regular dodo image, a dodo watercolour from the Dutch School. The Dutch, the same people that colonized Mauritius, and a drawing is from the 17th Century, which means that the chances of that painting had a real dodo as a model were pretty high.

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Running Slowly by Leah Palmer Preiss, aka Curious Art. I loved it!

According to my trusty 1878 Chambers’s Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, “The birds were easily killed, being wholly unable to fly, and running slowly. Their speedy extinction after the islands began to be visited and settled, is thus easily accounted for.”

Maybe it was the shoes?

Acrylic on text & map of Mauritius, 4×5″

Dead Dutch Authors as Dodo Birds: paper mache dodo birds made from the writing of obscure, dead, Dutch authors, 6″ long, $1500. By Alain Douglas Park.

Upper Deck Dodo – detail fish by Linda R. Herzog.

From Cryptomundo: What Did A Dodo Look Like?

In line with a question during an earlier discussion about how might have the dodo really appeared, the famed artist and Hollywood special effects man Bill Munn [...] contacted me.

Munns wrote: “I have done scientific reconstructions of the Dodo (of how they may have looked) with all coloration based on actual descriptions and the head sculpted from a skull cast provided by the Harvard Museum of Natural History.”

The following reconstruction is what Bill Munns created of the dodo, and may be the closest thing we have to how a living dodo looked in the wild.

The following reconstruction is actually the picture you saw above. For a bit more about information about Munns visit his site.

Detail from Big Baby Tiger and Dodo, and Mini Baby Tiger and Dodo, both by Heather, aka littlecabbage on Flickr.

Dodo And Boy Sculpture by Alena Wooten, via her deviantART page.

I had the pleasure of working with the incredible Vince Nguyen here at Blue Sky on this piece! This sculpture is based on his character he designed for a children’s book. (I’ll try scanning in the drawing I used to create this scupt) I must say, these talented folks I work with in the design dept. sure keep me busy with all these “SIMPLE” designs. Hard and time consuming to sculpt, but so fun nonetheless!

And from Vince Nguyen blog, Louis and The Dodo Sculpt:

So here’s a beautiful sculpt of Louis riding a dodo bird by Alena Wooten. The character was shown in a children’s book called Louis and the Dodo. It was one of my first children’s book years ago and it’s still one of my favorite books I’ve worked on. Alena is a super star sculptor at Blue Sky Studios and I jumped at the chance to get her to sculpt anything for me.

And finally the very cute illustration with the original characters from the book Louis & the Dodo by Mark Shulman, illustrated by Vincent Nguyen:

Harri’s dodos in the bedroom, protecting them while they sleep. Kristiina’s Housewarming photographed by Joshua Bousel.

A Dodo In Grand-Bay, photo by Delicious Mauritious.