Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week author Matt Wedel has two recent posts about the artistic reconstruction of sauropods. The one about head anatomy is especially perceptive.
I think these are dynamite, because they show that you can avoid “shrink-wrapped dinosaur syndrome” (SWDS) and still make an anatomically detailed, realistic-looking life restoration. SWDS is what I call the common convention in paleo-art of simply draping the skeleton–and especially the skull–in Spandex and calling that a life restoration. I think it’s a popular technique because you can show off the skeleton inside the animal and thereby demonstrate that you’ve done your homework (especially to an audience that already knows the skeletons*). It gives artists an easy way to add detail to their critters; if you actually slab on realistic soft tissues and lose most of those skeletal and cranial landmarks, you have to come up with something else to make your animals look detailed and visually interesting. And by now it’s been going strong for several decades, so people expect it.
Yes, hominin reconstructions are also subject to shrink-wrapped syndrome. I'm less critical of that than the "thousand-mile stare" pose that many reconstructions are given. There's more emotion in the Lincoln Memorial.
Wedel's earlier post, "Pimp my pod" discusses the idea of "too big for camouflage".