Paris Sketches - Scorpions

After emailing and bothering everyone at the National Museum of Natural History for weeks, I finally got the chance to meet some scientific illustrators!  Last Monday I met with an illustrator from the Paleontology Department at his studio, where he generously showed me some of his published work, his colleague's amazing fish illustrations, some of their equipment, and nearly every book ever written about scientific illustration.  After that whirlwind visit, he invited me back to actually use one of their drawing scopes called a camera lucida, which is a common tool for scientific illustrators that superimposes an image of the object you're drawing directly onto your paper.  This allows for precise illustrations of the specimen, and for my first time using it I got to draw a somewhat frightening specimen - a SCORPION.  It was Halloween, so I guess it was fitting.  Drawing with this scope took a little while to get use to (I had to keep one eye closed for the most part), but in the end it was kind of relaxing tracing every little detail.  Well, as relaxing as looking at a magnified scorpion could be.

For my first try, they suggested I draw the head and thoracic region of the scorpion.  The scope had a pretty limited view of the object, so first I had to draw it in sections.

After I had all the pieces sketched, I put it all together by using a light table and drawing on tracing paper over my original sketches with pen and ink.  Here is my final product after four hours of work!

After I finished this, they let me draw under the scope a little longer, so I sketched the ominous tail:

Since everyone at the museum has been so busy, I thought this meeting was going to be a one time thing, but after my visit they told me I can come by their studio once or twice a week to practice using the drawing scope!  And as if that wasn't awesome enough, they also invited me to come draw with them in the Comparative Anatomy/Paleontology Gallery in the museum when it is closed to the public!  Which means, I get to draw all the bones I want without one million people in there.  How did this become my life?