If you've been browsing my gallerey recently, I hope you mighti've wondered how I came up with these drawings:
Well, those are one of the many animals that I love to return to see every time in my life at the Oakland Museum My papa raised me with this place. It contains tons of historical displays of California that my ancestors took part in personally (like an interior of a Beat Cafe my grandfather frequented) as well as plenty of art of various styles created by locals or that deal with our city, the Bay Area, or California in general. However, the natural wildlife section on the basement floor is still my favorite. The museum becomes more like the Exploratorium down there! This floor details the wildlife and ecosystem and anything else from The Bay's shoreline to it's border by Nevada. One used to aslo get visual aided tours of it's terrain via a video projection of a film that's older than I (really, they've used the same reel of tape for over 20 years!) that takes us literally across California's wilderness (The flying over the "Half Dome" and "King Dome" was always the scariest scene I was allowed to watch back then)! There was also a audio and lights tour of the Ca's geography using those color coded maps, but they no longer have that working :(. Past that part there are exhibitions for every part of The Bay. There are more videos to watch of these regions, as well as audio samples of the wildernesses such as Coyotes communicating to each other at night. PLENTY OF ANIMALS. Now wild and exotic animal/pet exhibits, stores, etc are all over the Bay, but this one is a pretty neat refrence to go back to every time because they have two great features: One is the stuffed animals are in re-enactments of waht they'd be doing in the wild, such as a Coyote chasing a cottontail, a fisher (actually I haven't checked for what predator that was) cornering a porcupine up a tree, or a wolverie battling a coyote over some fresh kill that I tried to picture up top. I didn't make a good choice of the colored pencils to use, so that's why there aren't too many tonal and shading steps taken here. I also was nodeling a bit too much here, which my teacher told me to losen up a bit (paraphrase). That's how I got that ringtail you see next. Then, for the smaller animals -fish and insects too, I believe-they museum used a "freeze-dry" method to mounting and perserving them. It's similar to how they freeze-dry microwave foods, but way colder and ove the course of weeks so that there's no shriveling and deformation. The advantages to freeze drying a animal is that you don't have to recreate the skeleton with your own armature, and you also keep the musculature system as well! The eyes are glass, of course, and this method can only be applied to animals smaller than a muskrat or beaver. They are keped in special cases that prevents a certain beetle from invading and eating them, but they still can be posed and place in sections or reproductions of their habitats inside their display! The kangaroo mouse and ringtail are my two examples, as I didn't have much time that day in class (it's free every first Saturday of the month however!). The ringtail was the image that brought up my discussion on colors in the "Mentors" group. I showed it to another teacher, and he said the ringtail was too light, that the background diverted too much attention from him, and he was hard to even distinguish such as where his neck connected! Honestly, I wanted to sketch this one because liked the little mouse hiding behind the rock in the display there! I don't know what the ringtail was looking for, but they were less than one feet apart! Ringtail's aren't ment to be seen -by potintial predators- in their natural habitat, I could've told him. And the background was a lot darker or had lots of dark-colored details such as the moss and the huge cracks in the bedrock there that the ringtail could even hide in (I didn't have the best of colored pencils, like I said...so mixing lighter colors wasn't an option)! Do you think he was right for this piece, and discolored the ringtail just to make sure I could show this to anyone and their eyes could easily determine that he was in front and the background was...well the background and etc? One of these days I'll try painting or maybe even digital retouching/repainting but if you also saw the Speckatled bear from the sf zoo I tried in watercolour, you can see my reluctance to learn these skills (that and it's expensive) If you're ever traveling around the Bay, I'd definately recommend the Oakland Museum as a priority trip! Hope you enjoyed my review!
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