Sunday, June 24, 2007

Shiver me bones


I really really must get myself a proper skeleton model. a hundred anatomy books cannot substitute for a 3D model that one can actually touch and see from a continuum of angles(damn, is this an indictment of drawing??).

I can't resist saying it. Browsing this shop gives me a boner. :)

Forensics


"the only good way to clean the bones was to simmer them in a covered steam vat for the better part of the day, then scrub off the softened tissue with a toothbrush (not my own personal one, mind you)...Needless to say, [my wife] wasn't thrilled when she arrived home to the stench of cooking flesh and found a decaying human skull and femur simmering in her eight-quart kettle." (link)

No, it wasn't CSI that got me to nose around the field of forensics (though I was thrilled to learn of its exitence through a friend). From a love of the living body comes a curiosity for the dead, and a penchant for science leads to the need to pin down reality by measurement and classification. So drawing leads to anatomy and anatomy leads to forensics. And then you start roaming around life with X-ray eyes, enunciating insertion points and bony processes where once mere fleshy lumps used to lie.