It’s interesting rereading the commentary from where I drew it first time round. Where last time I was concerned about proportions, this time  I was far more concerned about the light. The lighting in the room is extremely unnatural – not that you expect to see giant skeletal Megalocerous running around in daylight of course.

The museum lights do throw shadows, which in turn effect the shape of the skull which I found distracting when trying to define the shape. I do feel, I have done far more justice to his jaw this time around, though I do feel I have cheated him on his teeth.

Also of note, where I mentioned in my drawing of the cranial nerves about the cheap pad I used that was extremely smudgy. I actually deliberately used this pad for this drawing, to use that “smudginess” to my advantage.

Posterior View Of Cranial Nerves

Moving away from the ear, my next few posts will be about eyes, but I wanted to first give an idea about the space in which all the aforementioned occupy. In my anatomy books,there are several cross section drawings, of things such as the right tympanic cavity, which is where the middle ears sits and I have got to take my hat off to those folks who do medical illustrations, as I do not feel confident in my ability at the moment to attempt to even do a straight copy of one of these illustrations.

What I did go for in the end was this drawing of the cranial nerves, and as you can see its extremley busy, but trust me, it is tame in comparison to the thympanic cavity. The moment you start adding nerves, muscles, bone it starts getting extremely crowded.

To give you more idea on where we are inside the head, I would suggest you take a look at my Pterygopalatine fossa sketch. We are behind this and I hope its clear in my picture here, that you can see where the skull is, and can picture how that continues to curve round to the pterygopalatine fossa, and of course there is the ear on the right.

Now, take a look at the size of the Incus, compared to a american cent  and take note on my drawing, where I have marked the Mastoid air cells. Everything I have drawn to date with the ear, takes place just above the this and goes from the outer ear, and just past the Sigmoid sinus. Many diagrams of the middle ear will show the Sigmoid sinus on.  Its also interesting to note, if you get an ear infection, those mastoid air cells can get infected, which you really don’t want.  I mention this, to indicate how everything around here is connected.  I hope this description has given you a better picture.

As for the drawing, usual culprit of pencils but new sketchbook, which has shown, shall we say- somewhat interesting characteristics. The sketchbook is by Boldmere, is a 130gsm and cost the grand sum of 99p. It does seem to have the magic ability to blunt any pencil on contact, which has made defining the lines in the drawing somewhat troublesome. The second interesting property it displays, is as regular readers will know, I take great care to avoid finger grease and keep hand contact to a minimum. Even by doing this, I managed to have a hand that was black along one side.

The paper really doesn’t take the graphite that well,its almost like charcoal in some senses, and most of the time during drawing this, I was afraid I was going to end up with a page of black smudge. Thankfully it was bluetac to the rescue.

I have been pondering whether to do a post on the joys I have been finding in using bluetac, but instead I will head you over to this excellent tutorial on the subject by Mike Sibley