Metalguru

So, what’s a newly-submitted Ph.D. student to do with his Saturday night? Party their ass off, obviously. Get raving drunk and stay out until the sun rises. Dance themselves stupid and swear the pavement has been re-laid in a wavy manner over the past few hours on the way home because, obviously, they’re still walking in a perfectly straight line and, hey, it’s the goddamn pavement’s problem that it ain’t straight no more. Yes, that’s what I probably should be doing, but if the friends of said Ph.D. student are either broke, working or in other parts of the country, organising such an evening may not be quite as straightforward as you might want. Still, there are plans for the coming weekend, and 1) it’s the start of a new month, so everyone will be loaded; 2) no-one, not no-one has to go to work and 3), pretty much everyone I know has had something occurring in the last two weeks worthy of celebration. Next weekend is going to be big; this one, not so much.

Anyway, to return to my original rhetoric, what’s a newly-submitted Ph.D. student to do with his Saturday night? Well, in this case, I’m catching up with a backlog of pictures people have asked me for. Numero uno is this thing here, my mecharaptor drawn for a chap at work who’s requested that I draw a mascot for his friend’s band, Robot Dinosaur (in case you hadn’t worked it out). Although this sort of stuff is new to Flickr, I’ve got a little collection of these that’s been building up since last Christmas (this is my first animal in some time, though, and - quelle surprise - my first extinct one). In fact, my lounge and office are decorated with several of them (you can see some in the aptly-christened Pterosaur Room otherwise known as the University of Portsmouth Geology Department Postgraduate Offices, at Tetrapod Zoology). The Mechathing style is nicked directly off the technical drawing I’ve spent far too-long doing over the last few years: when discussing and describing fossils, y’see, it often pays to provide a good line-drawing to demonstrate what you’re interpreting from a specimen. While some people are happy to produce simple outline sketches (often traced in using imaging software), I’m more of the opinion that your drawing should look like a stylised version of the real thing, removing any ambiguity over features that may be difficult to make out in a photograph of the specimen, but still looking like a three-dimensional object that could be picked-up from the paper (if you see what I mean). Now, because these things have to be accurate, it’s worth doing them in ink rather than pencil - even your harder 'H' pencils can begin to smudge if you work on the same image long enough - but adding shading with ink is difficult. You either scribble, which looks rubbish, or you dedicate the time into stippling. As you might imagine, producing a half-decent stippled drawing takes ages, and my thesis contains dozens of the buggers: drawing them and has probably left me with an crooked neck that would make me a perfect stunt-double for Max Shreck in Nosferatu. However, the worst part of technical drawing is not the stippling, but the total lack of creative input. Aside from deciding what cracks and fractures to omit from drawing a fossil specimen, you’re entirely tied to copying what you see in front of you onto the paper. I mean, that’s the entire point of the exercise and, necessary though it is, it’s extremely dull.

But, thought I one December morn last year, what if the powers of stippling were used for good, and not for evil (or, to be fairer to the undeniable utility of technical drawings, used in a slightly less restricted way)? Thus, the Mechathings were born, melding the neat shading of technical drawing with far more creative subject matter. Here, the stippling is meant to give the drawing a slightly schematic feel, like you’re looking at the plans of a machine that just happens to resemble a person or animal or whatever. They aren’t however, ‘working’ machines: look closely and you’ll realise that their cogs, gears and pistons wouldn’t really facilitate much motion. I guess they aren’t an exercise in machine design, then, but more just messing around with the concept of mechanised organic things. I should also point out that this image is only based on what I could remember of Velociraptor anatomy when I started it at work this afternoon because, for shame, I did the entire thing without consulting any anatomical references. Still, it kept me occupied while I was at work, and, well, I thought some people here might like to see it.

Anyway, that’ll do for now. I’m off to do more Saturday night-ish type things. Like reading a book. Hmm.

Rock n’ Roll.