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Old 10-07-2008, 09:33 PM
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KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Re: Katherine's Scrimshaw Tutorial: experimenting with mammoth ivory

Finally time to get to the fun part. Drawing, yay!

I decided to scrim a bison on this one, because they're cool. I went to Yellowstone this summer with a friend, and we were sitting there waiting for Old Faithful to do it's thing, and this big bison came strolling up right in front of us. It was awesome, and I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to photograph a very cooperative subject.

I kinda go the long way with something like this, because I like to draw, and I like to really understand the form of my subject, and get to know it well, so I did a preliminary pencil sketch. I didn't worry about the values, just wanted the draw the form. And then I did an outline drawing from that. So in this pic you see two printouts of my photos, a drawing, an outline drawing (which I then scanned and shrunk down), and the piece of ivory. Couldn't I just have traced the photo? Yeah, but I didn't want to, I don't like doing that. Although this photo happens to be pretty much exactly what I want to do, there are times when that's not the case and you need to be able to draw your own composition or really understand your subject. As I said before, this is what works for me, other people will have an entirely different approach.



So what's next? Well, I'm going to transfer the image to the ivory and start scrimming. It'll be b/w, and I'm not really going to have anything new and fabulous to talk about unless I have a disaster with the ivory itself (entirely possible). More dots, I'm just putting them in different places than I did last time. :D