Invert Illustrations 1

The lad is back!! My sailor-man is back!
It's terribly exciting. I haven't had time to make anything new lately so I've decided to post some Retro-tastic stuff from a few years ago. This hails from all the way in 2006 O_o.



I did my undergraduate degree in Marine Biology. In this particular programme, you have to take a course called "Invertebrate Biology". In fact, it is two courses taken over two semesters. It was a difficult course. A very very difficult course. We made t-shirts to commemorate passing the course. The average for my first midterm in that class was about a 50%. I got a 54 or something, and I was really quite proud.
One the reasons that this course was particularly nasty was the memorization of tons of structures in tons of animals. Memorization on structures was necessary for Vertebrate Biology as well, but we only focused on two species and because they are vertebrates, they're kinda similar to people, so the structures are comparable. Humans don't have apical tufts and we only have four limbs. For me I find that writing or drawing things out really cements the concept in my head. Needless to say, I did some sketches of invertebrate structures.
I was flipping through an old sketchbook and came across these beauties. I was actually quite impressed. I'm not sure if I had copied them from drawings or from photographs, either way they're not bad.

A close up of the first sheet.

Sheet 2: Some worms, a cross-section and a larva.

Another thing I found particularly interesting from browsing my old sketchbook was the quality of the drawings. They weren't pieces of art, but they were really quite good and daring compared to what I will try my hand at now. A lot of this stems from practice. In 2006, I had only been out of highschool for about 2 years and was still immersed in Artz Haus (Maid's Hall residence). So, I had not only just completed about 5 years worth of art classes throughout high school I was constantly encouraged to continue being arty in the first two years of undergrad.
I don't think my drawings now are crap, but it is a lot more difficult to produce what I did in undergrad.
The expression 'practice makes perfect' comes to mind and a variation of it I heard recently: 'practce makes permanent'.