So, one of my plans for 2016 is to sketch more (maybe one of my plans for 2016 should be to update my blog more often…ahem). As well as sketching in coffee shops, in the house and at the park, I’ve paid a few visits to Manchester Museum to draw their stuffed animals. The first time I sketched wolves (which led to a mixed media piece called Not Out of the Woods) and the second time I drew a nine-banded armadillo. This week I wanted to research dragons.

Now, you may think that they wouldn’t have dragons in Manchester Museum, but you would be wrong! I wasn’t expecting to see any actual dragons, but I found a rather appealing eastern bearded specimen in one of their display cases, along with a number of other lizards.

I am really enjoying sketching with Faber-Castell Pitt artist brush pens at the moment. I’ve been using the finer ones for a while, but until recently I more or less ignored the ones with brush tips. You really can’t be at all tentative about your sketching using these, which makes a change for me…and I like the results! For most of these I used Cold Grey IV and added a bit of tonal variety with the lighter Cold Grey I.

I was expecting to sketch a lot of birds in flight, but there weren’t too many in the museum. However, bat wings are surely closer to dragon wings than birds’ wings are, so I went with this Fruit Bat (poor thing looks a bit crispy in real life…I don’t think bat wings respond well to taxidermy). I also drew some snake and cane toad skin and the toad’s eye. The cane toad’s bumpy skin is similar to my idea of the skin on a dragon’s face.

Here is another bat, along with some different lizard faces and a griffon vulture’s foot. This unfortunate tuatara was pickled, and looks a bit pained!

I finished off with this crocodile skull, which was amazingly textured, though I didn’t spend much time trying to capture that…I was mostly interested in the teeth and the shape of the jaw. I finally sketched a bird with outstretched wings in the shape of this albatross. It’s not really saying ‘dragon’ to me, but it might be useful!