I would give a close-up or show how the pen outlines turned out – but I don’t want to give it away! Hopefully these mandible drawings will end up in a publication soon.

A note about my drawing set-up: The pencil drawings were sketched onto a regular sketch pad by looking through the camera lucida of a dissecting scope. In this photo I am about to start drawing on herculene drafting film with a Roting technical pen, held in a Leroy pen holder* to keep the pen vertical. I am wearing thin cotton gloves, which keep my skin’s oils off the drawing surface and help my hand to move smoothly when drawing curves. The green base you see is from an OTTLite I bought this weekend. Having that natural light makes a big difference when drawing. It is portable so right now it is in my office, and I already feel better (as opposed to sitting in the dim fluorescent light).

*A note about the Leroy pen holder – this is a trick our department’s illustrator taught me. Using a rubber band to keep the pen from wiggling too much (the holder was not meant for these pens) it offers much more control, especially when stippling. I just bought my own on Ebay and had to outbid someone in the last minute, they are quite hard to find!

I don’t think I’ll have too many issues with creating line drawings that are publication worthy, but I have a long way to go with stippling and other pen techniques. If I manage to put together anything interesting (or really bad and worth a laugh), I’ll share.