Zebra, graphite on Bristol vellum
Another safari animal!
Orthoceras
Orthoceras, graphite on Bristol
I wanted to try something paleontological, so I composed this scene of a little orthoceras (a nautiloid) living among marine plants about 450 million years ago. So many drawings of life in the Paleozoic era show lots of attacking going on, trying to show the survival of the fittest at work; I wanted my orthoceras to have a moment of peace, so I tucked him safely in some seaweed.
Giraffe (Head and Neck)
Giraffe (Head and Neck), graphite on Bristol
Moving on to some mammals…
Giraffes are awesome. They look like they could have just arrived via flying saucer. They’ve got the largest eyes of any land animal. They sleep standing up, needing at most two hours of sleep a day. And baby giraffes can walk and run just half an hour after being born.
Heron
Heron, graphite on Bristol (plate)
This is another bird we see on Orcas Island, especially along Crescent Beach just out of town.
Pine Siskin in Graphite
Pine Siskin in Graphite, graphite on vellum
We see pine siskins sometimes on Orcas Island, so I drew this in their honor.
Sunflower in Graphite
Sunflower in Graphite, graphite on Bristol vellum
Tulips in Graphite
Tulips in Graphite, graphite on drawing paper
Black Bear Skull
Black Bear Skull, graphite on drawing paper
This is another drawing I made at the Burke this past Thursday.
My original plan was to do a drawing of both a bear skull and a seal skull, because I’d learned on a recent whale watching trip in the San Juan Islands that bears, sea lions and seals are all closely related. I was going to draw a bear skull and a seal skull to compare them.
But at the Burke, these skulls looked more dissimilar than I had expected. A couple of those differences are that the bear’s skull is much larger, and that the bear’s back teeth are meant for grinding, rather than the seal’s sharp back teeth, which are meant for tearing.
While the black bear skull was far larger than the seal skull, I was surprised that the black bear skull seemed much smaller than how a bear’s head seems in real life. Jeff Bradley (from the Burke’s mammalogy collection) pointed out that the muscles and all that fur add up to make a living bear’s head much bigger.
I might still get to that seal skull, or maybe one of the cool seal skeletons they have there hanging from the back rooms at the Burke…
Sun Bear Skeleton
Sun Bear Skeleton, graphite on drawing paper
I again visited the collections at the Burke Museum Mammalogy department, and Jeff Bradley, the collection manager, generously took this skeleton of a sun bear down from a high shelf so I could draw it.
It came from the Woodland Park Zoo, but the Burke Museum is uncertain whether this particular bear actually lived at the zoo, or whether the zoo got this skeleton from another zoo. The zoo used this skeleton for educating kids and visitors. It had been handled quite a bit, so you can see it is missing a couple of feet!
Nicotiana
Nicotiana, pen & ink, colored pencils
It may be fall, but flowers are still blooming here in our backyard in Seattle.
