Inspired by Anita, I borrowed a skull from the school where I work, just to practice drawing something that I´m not used to. I put it in my bike bag on my way home, and it struck me what a funny sight it would be if I fell on my bike and a skull rolled out on the street. 🙂
Anyway, a skull is really interesting, once you start trying to capture it on paper. We´re so used to seeing skulls as symbols of things, meaning poison or death or heavy metal or whatever. An actual skull is much more intricate than a symbol or a logo, with shadows and strange shapes both on the outside and inside. And the whole time you have the thought somewhere in the back of your head that “this is how I actually look, too, on the inside”… Strange.
The first image is made without drawing, I painted directly in gouache in my Moleskine. The second one is funny – that crease between the pages in the sketchbook made my eyesight go wrong – the book was at a slight angle on my lap while drawing, and when I had finished I noticed that the eyes of the skull are completely out of line. The right (or lower, in this case) eye is way too far down. Guess I´ll have to lay the book flat the next time I want to draw across a whole spread…
Top drawing: 13 x 21 cm, gouache. Lower drawing: 26 x 21 cm, pencil and gouache. Both on Moleskine sketchbook pages.