Skull on tinted paper

I haven't drawn many skulls since my fascination with Paleoanthropology in college (at one point I really wanted to study ancient hominids). I should have taken the hint in college and studied art alongside my double-major of Anthropology and Philosophy. I would have loved to have been able to draw those things that fascinated me more effectively and perhaps become an artist like John Gurche. Click here to check out an example of his amazing sculpture of a Neanderthal. Humbling and mind-blowing at the same time.

In an effort to re-familiarize myself with human anatomy, I've been drawing and sketching various features. The drawing of a human skull is based on a plate in Stephen Roger Peck's excellent book, Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist, which I picked up at a used bookstore in 1991 or so. My copy is literally falling to pieces from being thumbed through, spread flat on a table while sketching, and generally serving to educate me about the human body.

I used charcoal pencil for the darks and a white charcoal pencil for the highlights. The medium tones are comprised of a touch of charcoal in places but mostly is simply the toned paper showing through. This is a new technique for me and I really enjoy being able to work from both ends of the tonal scale rather than simply building up darks with graphite. The charcoal limits the fine details I can produce compared to graphite, but it does push the darks much deeper than is typical for my drawings. This scan is nearly identical in tone to the original.

Here are some of the preliminary drawings I made before the skull drawing.

I've also been reading a new book, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, by Richard G. Klein. It's a textbook, so it's a massive tome (just shy of 1,000 pages) but is definitely a lucid exposition on the field of human origins. I haven't read much in the way of human development since the early 1990's, which was prior to the knowledge boom following the complete sequencing of the human genome. Some of the more recent discoveries have shed significant light on our understanding of our early history and I feel like a student again relearning a subject that has changed significantly since my first exposure.

I'd really like to delve more deeply into scientific illustration as it pertains to human origins and archaeology, so I'm hopeful that there may be opportunities to do this in the future.