2D Toolkit: Hunterian Trip

May 04, 2025

Hunterian Trip:

Partway through the year, I went on a trip to the Hunterian, a museum in London that contains extensive samples of preserved human and animal anatomy, including bones, muscles, tissues and organs. These samples, though being largely medical in interest, pose a unique and interesting drawing exercise. This is because they show physically what these elements of anatomy look like, isolated from the rest of the body. Set up in exhibits, you can also see how said specimens look in a variety of angles.

Below are all the sketches I completed throughout the visit to the museum. As I was in the museum with others, and as others were moving through it, I tried not to linger on any one drawing and instead tried to focus on overarching shapes and silhouettes. As such, the drawings themselves vary in quality: most are sketchy with feathered or jagged lines. I did this because I wanted to quickly build up the rough shapes of the masses. I occasionally followed the outline of the form in quick, almost dotted motions. This technique was of varying success. On the whole, then, the trip proved to be a good opportunity to examine animals and areas of anatomy that I rarely see, and allowed me to draw them in a manner that tested my skills in drawing quickly, as well as general still life.

I found the skeletons of birds particularly interesting to draw. When creating these drawings, I wanted to provide the rough impression of the many bones that create their ribs and spines, using rough gestural lines to do so. In a sense, the drawings I completed during the course of the trip were an extension of the gestural drawings I completed in life drawing sessions: rouigh approximations of a form that block out the position and proportion of overarching body masses. These techniques are useful when creating quick concepts and designs, and could be useful when needing to create multiple variants of designs very quickly.