chickiehac:

chisuburedo:

voyagehour:

Taking a class called Scientific Illustration (with Peggy Macnamara who is amazing, look her up) at the Field Museum in Chicago. 

I’ve never taken a formal drawing class, so I was pretty excited for this. Kinda sad, since I’m sure most kids in my art school have taken formal drawing classes (you can see the differences between my scrawls and everyone pumping out these well refined drawings). 

Used a method called crawling. It’s a long process—I forced myself to take my time. First picture took me 2 hours maybe. I took a lot of breaks since I was so sleepy (had to wake up around 6:40 for a 9 am class :|), and it was freezing cold in the museum. I’m pretty darn proud of myself, since I can’t draw animals. 

Tell me more about crawling…is it, like, drawing small boxes and then drawing the negative space? Or am I completely off…?

I’ll try to make a concise explanation of it (because as I was writing, I was writing pages of explanation and that’s just…insane). You can draw small boxes, draw out the negative space—that’s a part of it. What crawling is, is that you take a home base (let’s say an eye) and from there you draw in the shapes around the eye. You use your pencil as a measuring device to figure out the distance from your home base to, let’s say, the left edge of the bird’s head. Then you draw out lines as a kind of marking and measurement that you can use to figure out the placements of the bird’s body. 

So, for example, look at the very left edge of the beak/mouth area and how the line draws out. I take out my pencil, hold it up, and kind of place it so it looks like it’s touching the edge of that beak (when in reality, I just look like I’m waving my pencil around uselessly). In my head I think (after I am absolutely sure that the head as been properly measured out and in proportion), “Okay, the edge of this beak is in alignment with this back curve on the bird’s neck.” I draw out the line from the beak, and make a general mark, swoop of my pencil, to indicate that this is where the neck has its bend. And then I can look from that curve to figure out how the jutted out part of the neck (the right side) places in comparison. 

Crawling is just drawing what you see, but in a very meticulous and slow way. You start from home base and slowly make your way to the rest of the bird. Everyone draws differently. I use my pencil to figure out how long an eye is compared to the rest (like, is the neck as long as how many eyes?), which the professor wasn’t really teaching, but it works out best for me (I can’t guesstimate, I freak out). I also just use my pencil as a kind of marker against edges of the bird. The more you do this, the better you get. This week, we had to draw diagonals, which is harder than it sounds.

I might upload some pictures better explaining what I mean if you want…it’ll be a lot easier to understand (and easier for me to explain, won’t take long).  

This week I tried some modeling as well (which is a lot more manipulative than I thought—you can’t just draw in everything you see, you have to consider the drawing as a whole). 

sigh, I accidentally reblogged it on my main blog instead of this one.

(via voyeurhour)