Evanston artist brings prehistoric creatures to life, while keeping a childhood love of drawing alive

Like a watchmaker, Jamie Gustafson hunches over his desk, his face inches from his work.

To almost anyone else, the drawing he’s working on would look complete, but Gustafson isn’t satisfied with the dark-brown scales on the prehistoric creature’s forelegs; they don’t jump off the page the way he’d like.

“There is no such thing as perfection, but I am in a way a perfectionist. I will agonize over small, little details,” says Gustafson, working in his Evanston home studio on a recent afternoon.

On another sheet of paper: a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth fossil, a drawing so lifelike, it looks like you could pluck the fossil off the paper and — carefully — tap its pointy tip.

Gustafson, 45, is a professional artist. His is a dream job, the kind that if he were your dad, you would have bragged about it in grade school. He draws dinosaurs, whales, sharks, eagles and pretty much anything else from the natural world. His clients have included National Geographic, DK Smithsonian and scientists working at the Field Museum.

Gustafson, who grew up in the Rogers Park neighborhood, said he’s been drawing from the time he could curl his fingers around a crayon.

In grade school art class, “There would usually be a congregation of kids around my desk watching,” he said, without a hint of bragging. “They would ask, ‘How did you do that?’ And I would end up teaching my own little side lesson.”

His friends wanted him to draw superheroes and Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Gustafson was also drawn to the intricate illustrations he found while thumbing through encyclopedias.

"My mom was like, 'Somebody has to draw that,' and that was always in the back of my mind," Gustafson said.

A childhood love of drawing gave way to the serious business of making a living. So for 12 years, he worked as a graphic designer. But one day in 2018, he started posting wildlife drawings on his Instagram page. Soon, publishers and editors were reaching out.

"It kind of snowballed from there," he said.

Before he puts pencils (he has hundreds of colors) to paper, Gustafson can easily spend two to three weeks researching the creature he's about to draw.

"There are tons of online resources," he said. His sunny apartment is cluttered with dozens of fossils, including prehistoric shark teeth. Sometimes he'll clutch the tooth or a bone of the particular dinosaur he's drawing, just to get in the mood, he said.

Almost none of his own work hangs from the walls of his apartment — except, that is, a life-size size human brain, done in mostly pink and gray pencil.

“It’s the center of where all of this comes from. Everything starts as a thought, right?” he said.

Take a look at one of his T. rex drawings and you might notice something peculiar. Gustafson's has the creature's mouth closed, almost as if it were smiling.

“They were animals. We see all these snarling, drooling (dinosaurs) — that’s what we think of, but that’s probably not what they were like," he said. “I want to make them the living, breathing animals that they were and not monsters or mythological creatures.”

Gustafson says he makes artistic choices based on science.

"When I take too many liberties, you get the paleontology police after you," he said. “My least favorite thing is when someone ... says, 'That’s not what it looked like.'"

To which Gustafson might reply, "If you have photographic references of that animal, I would love you to share them with me.”

Gustafson's kids — Orion, 13, and Phoenix, 12 — said they think their dad's work is "cool."

Phoenix makes animated movies with his Lego creations, while Orion is an artist.

You could forgive Orion if he wasn't in total awe of his dad's abilities.

Orion taps on his phone and pulls up a pencil sketch he recently did of the actor Dwayne Johnson, aka, "The Rock." It's startling good — as if Orion has pierced the actor's macho persona to reveal something more vulnerable, darker. A photograph of the portrait made its way back to the source, who told Orion that he loved it.

“He’s better than I was at that age for sure," Gustafson said proudly of his son.

That's a story for another day perhaps.