Fun for all the Family...

Hi everyone, I've been drawing dead stuff...check it out:



This is Cecil.And me.


And we're in the student anatomy lab at Cornell Vet school. Cecil is one of my most recent acquaintances here in Ithaca. As you can see from the picture, he's a friendly soul who likes a joke as much as the next person, even if it's at his own expense. He's a little on the quiet side. But then he is a 10 year old dead, eviscerated iguana specimen so I suppose he's entitled to be a little less than talkative. I met Cecil through John, a professor at the Vet school who very kindly introduced us as part of my bid to complete my illustration portfolio in time to apply for the scientific illustration course at the University of Santa Cruz. Cecil, proved to be a great sitter. Very....still....and dead....and kind of messy....in short the ideal subject for an illustration. He was also rather smelly, but luckily I had a strong stomach that day, so I didn't feel to green afterwards. It's proving to be fascinating experience and I've been able to have a look at where Cornell prepares it's specimens, how they are preserved and so on. Weirdly, they have a bug colony that strips the soft tissue from skeletal remains they want to keep as part of the preservation process. Cool eh? Anyway I'm in the process of producing an illustration of Cecil so we'll see how it goes, but so far the whole experience has been really interesting for me.

Oh and just so you're not too grossed out here's a prettier picture.

In other news, we're in teh middle of panicking about moving back to the UK and then to Vancouver. There's lots to do, so let's hope everything works out.
Bye for now!
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