Audubon Scientific Illustration

Audubon Scientific Illustration Blog #1

Illustrated by John Muir Laws

Hi Friends!

Welcome to my first-ever blog post! This will serve as my diary throughout my time in the Audubon Scientific Illustration course, where I will post updates about our projects and excursions. Today was our first class and we began with a presentation by Dr. Moore, who went over the importance of art and illustration in scientific research and documentation. Scientific drawings focus on an accurate portrayal of your subject. It is essential to illustrate the correct proportions and include any essential details that can help identify the subject/species. Because of this, it is a good idea to add notes surrounding the drawing to provide further information about the specimen being illustrated.

Professor Lemeh’s presentation gave us some valuable information about different techniques, methods, and mediums we can use throughout the course. Along with this, we began working on a few shading exercises utilizing both graphite and colored pencils. These exercises really helped me to practice different shading methods and showed me the difference between each type of graphite pencil. Mixing different colored pencils together through crosshatching was a technique I had never tried before and it was interesting to see how colors can be mixed without traditional blending.