New Site, New Blog

Hello, all! Just for future reference, since my new website has a built-in blog section, future updates will be posted there instead. So after almost ten years of intermittent updates, this site is effectively decommissioned and will live on as an archive. For new stuff, see here:

Ultimate Mark: Blog

Pterror of the Pterosaurs!

I've been looking forward to the traveling Pterosaurs exhibit at the Academy of Sciences all year! And indeed, it was so pteriffic that it's taken me three visits to draw all the wingtastic displays.

And now for round two!

I saved the best and biggest for last.

Dinosaur Class at the UCMP

This past weekend, I attended a special "short course" at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley. This was basically a day-long program of presentations on recent dinosaur research, so basically the most awesome school day ever! Naturally I took notes; any scientific or terminology errors are entirely my fault.

So we end on a mystery, and the dino-romance continues! On the way out I stopped to sketch some Triceratops skulls in the museum library. I think I like the exploded diagram approach...

New York, New York

My wife and I made a quick visit to New York City back in January, which involved a lot of museum-going. Some highlights...

January 18, 2017: The American Museum of Natural History. The refurbished dioramas were incredible, but I only had a couple of hours to draw, so all you're getting is fossils.

 

 

 

 

 

  

January 20, 2017: We walked the Highline, an abandoned freight railway that's been converted into a lovely elevated public park, then made our way over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were a bunch of nice folks from the 92nd Street Y sketching in a sculpture court, but that armor collection was calling to me...

 

January 21, 2017: And here are a few from the post-inauguration Women's March in New York. We watched for a bit on Fifth Avenue, got an aerial view from the Rockefeller Center, then staked out the finish line at Trump Tower.

 

January 22, 2017: To wrap things up, we finally left Manhattan and visited the Bronx Zoo. Here's a sampling of the fraction of the zoo we were able to explore...

 

 

 

 

 

SF Zoo: The Mega Catchup Part 2

And now to finish clearing out my backlog of animal drawings from Bay Area establishments! Here's the last four months' worth of San Francisco Zoo sketching.

October 31, 2016: For Halloween, I went to the zoo with Sarah Barrie Fenton and her animation students. My theme this time was bugs bugs bugs, whether giant sculptures, pinned specimens, or living cuties.

November 5, 2016: This time I tried to complete Sarah's scavenger hunt, although I didn't get very far - I kept getting distracted by critters that weren't on the list, or (in at least one case) weren't even supposed to be at the zoo.

 

 

 

 

January 5, 2017: National Bird Day! Instead of exotic avians, I ended up making close studies of ducks and turkeys. Plus a completely bizarre arachnid, and a speed round of monochrome critters...

 

 

 

March 1, 2017: Another group outing with Emma Burns and Ian Grabinski. This time, less fancy painting, and more structural studies of bears and sea lions and such. Plus a rare sloth action sequence and the surprising Best Of The Day!