Diary of a Skull Man

• DIARY OF A SKULL MAN

  Join me on a journey not quite as far as into the human mind... just a few millimeters outside of it.

• THE BACKGROUND

  Step 1: Take a step backwards.

• ONE DAY/DAY ONE

  The day had arrived.

• THE THIRD BEGINNING

  Let's get on with this, already.

• ADDING AND REFINING

  Trying to make things better without making them worse.

• THE JAW

  You gotta have a trap before you can shut it.

A big reason why I redid my website almost 2 years ago was to make posting new stuff easier. To be honest, I think it is easier, it’s just that I have a lot less free time than I used to post new material. But here is something new (relatively, anyway), and it is a grand crossover between my top level categorizations – an article about my artwork. I’m not sure what the outcome of this set of articles will be, since I haven’t defined an endpoint, but I hope you’ll stick around for it.

I’ve loved, studied and drawn dinosaurs since high school, and while many people know this, I suspect few know exactly where this love came from. Granted, I’m not entirely sure I can tell you either since love likely doesn’t have an easily traceable origin, however, I can provide some context for my interest in them. Most people assume that I simply never let go a childhood admiration for dinosaurs, and I doubt I ever relinquished this love completely, but it had significantly waned in my adolescence, replaced by an intense interest in comparative anatomy. That itself began a few years earlier when I started copying drawings out of a human anatomy textbook. I enjoyed gaining a clearer understanding of the underlying structures I had been trying to draw in the various comic book characters I was creating. After making these drawings with a sort of blinders on where all I did was copy these drawings completely uncritically, I began to notice all the analogs in other animals, whether it was a household pet, a wild animal I’d come into contact with, a museum mount or roadkill that I’d encounter on my walk home from school. I was fascinated by all of it and I began studying and drawing these subjects.

When I then watched Jurassic Park, I was completely blown away. Not because of the by-the-numbers hubris narrative or the silly characters, but because of the dinosaurs. They had been so vividly created by ILM, they seemed absolutely life-like. I had the same sort of comparative anatomy experience I’d had with other extant fauna so recently. They ignited my imagination where everything familiar about anatomy became shocking, alien and monstrous and yet still retained the same beauty I’d come to admire.

After so many years of devoting myself to dinosaurs, I wanted to revisit those first moments of pleasure of drawing the human skull. It was the skull that I found most compelling to draw, and I found myself doodling it more and more often. Looking over what I had published in the last 10 years, I realized it was time to make a 3D model of a human skull.