Dutch Angle

On the newsstands now is a special collector's edition about dinosaurs from Scientific American. The cover image is the running Giganotosaurus that I painted a while back. (Thanks, Gene)

Note that this is the cloudless version of the image. A later state of the painting (below) includes cirrus clouds and a flock of pterosaurs.

For this picture I used a compositional device called a "Dutch angle," where the camera is tilted off its vertical axis to lend a sense of unease, tension, or impending danger.

The term Dutch angle (also called Dutch tilt, canted angle, oblique angle or German angle) comes from the movie world, where it was pioneered in the 1919 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

It was also often used by illustrators doing movie posters and paperback covers in the 1970s and 1960s.

This poster by Frank McCarthy has it all: guns, girls, explosions, bright colors, and a Dutch angle.

And John Berkey used it in this hydro ship, which would have looked more static if the horizon had been level.