A few times a years the Museum invites people to register to attend the Drawing Studio and you can request a specimen from the Museum’s collection to draw. I attended this special event at the Melbourne Museum once before in February and wrote about it and shared my drawings from the day here.

 A Melbourne Museum staff member was in the room all day and if we wanted the specimens moved on the table to a different angle they donned their gloves and shifted these fragile objects. Some have also been preserved with arsenic,so they are hazardous too. Wet materials were not permitted, so I was not able to use my waterbrush in the room. I got around this by adding lots of marks and colour with watercolour pencil on the page and then leaving the room and adding water to the page with my waterbrush just outside the door.

At 10am I started immediately on my sugar glider.

The drawing is in a A4 Moleskine Watercolour Sketchbook. I drew the shape lightly on the page to make sure I would fit him on the page. I worked on him solidly all morning. In hindsight, I probably should have done a few quick sketch from different angles, just to get in the mood. Next time I will take that approach. Yesterday I kept adding colour and detail til lunchtime.

I did not know how the specimen would be positioned when I ordered him. He is not in full flight. There is a membrane between the front fingers/paws and the back leg which allows the gliding between trees. In this specimen you can see all of the folded fur that would stretch out when gliding. His nose is a little missing and scrunched. They are usually pink, And I could not see his paws and claws on the branch.

I chose a sugar glider as we had seen them when I was young when we went on a camping trip at a National Park. I remember seeing them in the trees and feeding them, but I don’t think I saw them gliding.

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After lunch I decided to move to other specimens in the room that other people had requested.

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This hare looked simple, but was very difficult to draw. Three of us were sketching him from different angles and all agreed that it was a lot more complex that we all thought it would be. Not sure why…

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Above are some birds from the collection

And now some real life live birds. Sketched on the way to the Museum. These two rainbow lorikeets were loudly screeching on the street sign above me. They never stay still for long. I was going to take a photo and decided to try for a very quick sketch, So glad I did. I sketched this in only a few minutes. I then walked up to the Melbourne Museum to spend over two hours on my next drawing of the sugar glider. From one extreme to another.Both were immensely fun an satisfying.