Robert Nicholls

Bob Nicholls is a world renowned natural history artist and writer, with a reputation for producing exciting and scientifically accurate paleontological artworks.  Bob has been published in more than forty books with global distribution and exhibited in over forty museums, universities and visitor attractions throughout the world.  Notable publishing clients include National Geographic,  Oxford University Press, Dorling Kindersley, Pearson, Macmillan, Orion Publishing, and Titan Books.  Other notable clients include the London Natural History Museum, University of Chicago, Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Centre, , and the Walking with Dinosaurs Exhibition. In addition to these, Bob has appeared on camera many times, including live broadcasts on BBC2 television.

Bob began drawing prehistoric animals from the moment he was old enough to hold a pencil and today he has almost twenty years professional experience; trading under the name Paleocreations (www.paleocreations.com). Bob has mastered a huge variety of mediums, and his portfolio contains traditional paintings, digital paintings, photographic composite illustrations, large-scale mural paintings, themed dioramas, digital sculpture and traditionally built models. At any moment Bob could be producing a small digital painting for a postage stamp or building a life-size dinosaur.

To reconstruct extinct animals, plants and environments, Bob undertakes a painstaking inside-out reconstruction process. First, all the fossil material is studied and measured [either physically, or by examination of scientific papers], then, using comparative anatomy, the skeleton is reconstructed on paper. Second, the soft tissues are added to the drawings before the integument and colours are considered. This process ensures Bob’s artworks are accurate and completely unique. Bob has also become a pioneer in the reconstruction of fossilised colour patterns, and his 2016 model of Psittacosaurus has been widely accepted as the world’s most accurate dinosaur reconstruction.