Sunday 12 February 2012

Merry Darwin Day 2012!

Appropriately enough, I'm working on some scientific illustrations of beetles this Darwin Day. Can't show anyone yet. 

Please enjoy these images of our man Charles from years' past, and make sure to read The Beagle Project's Blog post about Darwin's birthday aboard the H.M.S. Beagle. 

The images below are from 2009, when I attempted to live blog progress from scratch of a new oil painting of a young Charles Darwin discovering a glyptodont skull in South America during the voyage of the Beagle. At the time (you can find all the blog entries in February 2009) I wasn't happy with how the piece was turning out, and the exercise got weird. Still glad I attempted it - it's good to experiment.

If you look at the first sketch, you can see the ghostly sketch of the Beagle masts rising behind our young explorer.

Quick sketch to get the shadows and composition down.





Focused on the face first. Relatively happy with the pencils.

Tinted in Photoshop, I actually like this sketched image better than the final.

My work station. Love those Micron brushes. 

More or less (somewhat less) complete. 



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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
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