Traditional Art - Natural History Museum #6

 For my traditional work, I chose to do a study of a mammoth skull from the natural history museum. I’d sketched out small boxes to get the scaling of the skull correct before starting my final piece- since the skull had very long tusks, if I didn’t see this through initially, I easily could’ve made the base of the skull too large and then the tusk would be going off the page or it would’ve looked disproportionate.

I began my shading by adding in the darkest tones first. The skull was fairly light in colour so I wanted to ensure I didn’t go too dark on the forefront of the skull or else there wouldn’t be enough contrast between the midtones and the shadows, making the whole thing too dark. I tried to keep my shading very cohesive in order to get the bone texture across well. I followed the form of the skull with my shading, aiming to keep all my pencil strokes going in the same direction.

I feel I could’ve pushed my shadows a bit further in some areas like towards the teeth to get a more obvious gradation from the side of the skull to somewhat underneath it. Even if that wasn’t necessarily the case when looking at the skull in the virtual tour (since there was a fair amount of lighting coming from all directions), I feel as though that addition would’ve made the finished piece look a bit more striking even if it fawned away from my reference point. It’ll be something I keep in mind in future.