Fun making badges

My badge making thing has arrived.  What fun this is!  I just thought I would try it out so did a couple of felt pen sketches - from my original drawings done at the museum.  I then took three of my photographs and played around with them and printed them out.  Here are the results.  The idea is that I will get visitors to the museum to do their own little sketch or drawing and make it into a badge so that they have their own original souvenir..... that is if I don't use them all up playing around with them first :)

More fossils

I did go back to Whitby Museum on Thursday and spent the whole day sketching and photographing things, concentrating mainly on the extraordinary fossil collection.  If you 'click' on the picture of the Museum on the right it will take you to their website, with details of the collections and of the opening times.

The plant fossil is Cladophlebis denticulata which is a very graphic matte black, with the delicacy almost of a watercolour painting across the surface of the stone.  

In contrast the photograph of rib cage (below) is just the central section of a large Plesiosaurus Propinquus.  It is astonishing to me that such contrasting things can have survived almost intact for an inconceivable period of time.  There are so many beautiful patterns and structures in this part of the collection I could spend the whole year of my residency at the museum staring into one cabinet and not get bored but there is so much else to investigate in there.

I am beginning to develop a few ideas and at some point will publish a plan of workshops I will be involved in running inspired by the collections throughout 2009

Holotypes and ammonites

I have been into Whitby Museum again this afternoon, thinking I would do a bit of quiet sketching. Instead I have met a number of very interesting people (and apologise in advance to them as I won't remember any of their names) and been introduced to some holotypes of ammonites.  Now I have always liked the fossil collection but really only ever viewed it as a series of interesting patterns and forms.  I had realised that the museum had an important collection but now know that it has a number of 'holotypes' - which as I understand it are the actual physical examples (or one of several examples) used when the species of ammonites were being formally described for geological and scientific identification purposes and, yes, when you look more carefully you can see the differences in them!    I need to go in when there is no-one around now so that I can look more carefully and maybe even sketch and photograph some of them.  

I knew being artist in residence at Whitby Museum would be interesting and exciting but had no real idea of the wealth of inspirational material there was tucked away there............ just waiting to be explored.