Skeleton of the Dodo

Here's a shot of something in progress: it's a sketch for one of the illustrations in The Vanishing Bestiary (which I mentioned last post, though I may not have called it by its title).

Due to the assortment of reference photos and illustrations I was using, many of the them either very old, or rather low-res, or at a bad angle, there are some details I had to fudge a little and some that aren't as, well, detailed as I'd like. Ultimately, this will be a lino print, which won't hold s much detail as a drawing anyway, so it probably won't matter. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind finishing this as a drawing, too, and maybe even doing a non-fine-print version of The Vanishing Bestiary.

I am the Skeleton in my Closet

That post title doesn't really mean anything, I just thought it sounded amusing. I haven't got a proper post today, except to say I'm not actually dead and I am planning to start posting regularly again. For one thing, I've been doing some reading towards eventually getting back into working on revising and adding illustrations to my (now rather venerable) undergrad honours thesis on North American canid bones in archaeology. I even have access to most of a coyote skeleton to help me fill in some of the carpals and tarsals that were missing from the specimens I used to make the original illustrations. And I have a few more books to refer to so I can add species I wasn't able to cover before.

A second little update tidbit: I've started working (well, so far just in my head) on a bestiary that will be illustrated with skeletons. It'll be a fine-press, hand-printed and hand-bound thing and I hope to get started on a test illustration this weekend. You can read more about that on my art/writing/living in the woods blog Anagram for Ink.

Other than that, I am full of ideas and projects and things-to-do. I have a few more great resources to blog about and link, some books to review, and I really want to do some drawings of raven bones. In other words, I'm too busy for my own good.

"Bones With Bling" in Fortean Times

Via Morbid Anatomy (which you should be reading if you like the morbid, odd, and peculiar), there's an article in the Fortean Times on "the amazing jewelled skeletons of Europe," titled Bones with Bling.

I'm not likely to link to Fortean Times very often, but this is an interesting piece about a forgotten part of Catholic Christian history, when supposedly psychic priests would "discover" the bones of saints and martyrs which would then be lavishly decorated as relics. Of course, many of the skeletons had probably belonged to ordinary people--even pagans--but more saintly relics meant greater prestige for the Church and could mean increasing attendance (and therefore wealth) at smaller churches.

Whether these bones belonged to holy people or ordinary people, they certainly make beautiful displays.

OsteoSophy on Etsy

I added intercaps in the name, mostly because it looked nicer on the banner. So, yeah. I opened (another) Etsy shop to sell my new line of copper animal skull jewellery (because I don't already have too many things to do).

Here are the first few items for sale (and after this, I probably won't mention this stuff again, unless I make something really exciting, but I will add a widget or link or something to the sidebar).

First, I made a thylacine (above, posing on a whitetail deer skull), because everyone needs a thylacine. Right?

 Then a fox, which I really made for myself. I listed it for sale, but if someone buys it, I'll have to make another for me.

 A badger, which never fails to lodge that silly song "badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom" in my head (don't know what I'm talking about? go here).

Finally, a snowshoe hare, because things other than carnivores have cool skulls, too. I've got a whole pile of drawings ready to resize so I can make more--deer, goat, dolphin, bear, various birds, some herps. Eventually I'll add some dinosaurs.

Bone Art: Takayuki Hori

Here's something absolutely breathtaking: "Oritsunagumono" by artist Takayuki Hori.

Each piece was printed on translucent paper and then folded using traditional origami patterns. Some of them have coloured images of trash superimposed on them, as a comment on "the animal's plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem."

The pieces are displayed on a lightbox, with an unfolded version of the image in a frame on the wall behind. See more photographs on designboom. Really, go and look, this work is just amazing.

Some of you may know that I'm also a letterpress printer, and I'm just dying to borrow this idea and letterpress print skeletons on origami paper. I don't know if I will, though, except maybe to make a few for myself.

Bone Art: Jessica Joslin

There's a great interview with artist Jessica Joslin over at Hi Fructose magazine. Here's a little snippet that really struck me, though I encourage you to read the whole thing:

There is a strange intimacy in working with bones, and there are often tangible tales about the animal's life embedded within. I know whether it died young or old, if it had arthritis or parasites, if it had broken a bone and if so, how long ago and whether it would have limped. It might have bits of shrapnel embedded, with the bone grown up around it like a pearl--that tells me that it had a run-in with a hunter and survived. Fellini once said, “The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.” If you know how to read them, bones are an animal's autobiography.

On my list of artists whose work I would like to own if I became suddenly wealthy, Joslin is pretty close to the top. I could imagine a crazy Victorian house filed with her sculptures (though actually I want a Craftsman house some day).

She's also got a gorgeous new website with many, many pictures of her work. Looking through them all, I really wished for a nice, heavy art book that I could flip through on my couch. And look, there is a book! I'll have to save my pennies and buy a copy.

Bone Art: Kate MacDowell

Thanks to a friend's StumbleUpon bookmarks, I came across the incredible ceramic sculptures of Kate MacDowell a day or two ago.

Notice the human skeleton. She has several more along the same lines, as well as other beautiful, surreal pieces. Songbirds perching inside a pair of human lungs, literal clay pigeons, and other wonderful things. Go look at her portfolio, you will be amazed.

Bone Art: The Evolution of Flight

A few years ago, when I was still in art school, I made a lithograph titled "The Evolution of Flight." It ties in to some stories and comics and books and artefacts I've been working on which will all come together in something bigger once I figure out what shape I want it to take.

But anyway, what's relevant for this blog is that I used bones in it. The print -- as you can see from the image -- is multiple layers of stuff. For those interested, I started with three runs from a litho stone, altering it each time with etching and sanding (that's the wing shape that dominates the image from far away). Then I added two separate runs from aluminum photoplates, made from my own drawings (or handwriting, in the case of the brown layer). One of those plates is a sort of comparative anatomy diagram, which came to mind when I was writing up the book review in my last post.

The image shows four skeletal limbs. The first is a bird:

The next is bat:

Then, of course, human, because this is the evolution of human flight:

And the final one is not from an animal but a flying machine (of my own silly invention) called a pterothopter.

In retrospect, I should also have included a pterosaur wing, though the pterpthopter is acutally named for Pteropus, the genus of bats called "flying foxes" and not for the pterosaurs. Still, it would have been a good thing to have.

The handwriting, incidentally, is bits of a story about a made scientist character who decided to create flying humans. She intended to do so through a combination of selective breeding and prosthetic surgery, but eventually gave up to work on flying machines with human pilots instead (and her neighbours breathed a sigh of relief).

And Now for Something Completely Different

OK, it's not a flying circus, but it is a sideshow.

Lately, I've been working on improving my illustration skills by making ATCs or Artist Trading Cards. It's fun to make little art and trade it with other folks, and themed swaps make me stretch myself to see what I can come up with to fit. But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with bones? Well, I haven't posted here recently (though I'm going to aim for at least one post a week from here on), as I've been busy with art and writing and various other things. But this past week I had a chance to draw some bones for an ATC swap.

So, without further ado, may I present A Scientific Study of Sideshow Freaks through their Skeletal Anatomy (which is, of course, not scientific at all--though it would be fun to re-do them as Victorian-esque scientific drawings, come to think of it).

Exhibit 1: The Rat-Tailed Boy

Exhibit 2: The Two-Headed Man

Exhibit 3: The Three-Legged Woman

Exhibit 4: The "Mermaid"

Next post, I promise to get back to the more serious business of bone study.

Taxidermy in Art

There's a great post on taxidermy in art over at Dr InSectus's Cabinet of Curiosities. The art of Ron Pippin, Jessica Joslin and Rosamond Purcell are all covered (with pictures!), and the work is just beautiful. I was already familiar with all three artists, but there were a few images here I hadn't seen. I'm especially fond of the work of Rosamond Purcell (who I'm also a fan of on Facebook). I've got a couple of her books, which I'll probably talk about in later posts, and I'm working on a triptych of linoprints based on one of her photographs of fossils. (OK, sometimes I secretly want to be Rosamond Purcell, except mostly I'm too fond of being myself.)

Some of this is the kind of work I can imagine myself doing, if I had more tools and more skills. Lately I'm imagining mounted and posed cow skeletons lurking in the bushes around my 5 acres. I know where to get the skeletons, too. Maybe this summer I'll get ambitious and learn how to mount them. If BillyZee will let me fill our property with skeletal cows. He might not like that.