Today my fellow Concept Artists and I went to draw some sketches at the Hunterian Museum of Surgeons in London.

Every time I go to a museum with the precise intention of drawing there’s something that prevents me from doing it.
A couple of times it was the throng of people loitering in front of the exhibits, another time I had to run back home to sort some things out, this time I’ve just been silly.
Today I spent most of the time looking at the hundreds of specimens preserved in formaldehyde telling to myself “whoa, I’ll totally come back later to draw this”.
I never did. I mean, the Museum of Surgeons is really cool, I just got lost in contemplation.

When I realised it was time to catch the train home, I had managed to draw just a couple of sketches on my pocket PaperBlank and one on my bigger watercolour sketch pad.

For some reasons today I had a thing with skeletons.

A human skull and a squid.

A bird of some kind.

A Penguin.

I totally failed to draw any of the most interesting specimens.
John Hunter (1728-1793), founder of the museum, was an avid collector, and aside from taking most of the samples himself he also travelled all across the world to buy the rarest items available at the time.
Amongst the most interesting there was the skeleton of a GIGANTIC Irishman (about 2.30m tall), a hydrocephalus skull and a calf with its head growing inside its ribcage.

Ok, it wasn’t a collection of deformities, these were just the most interesting ones under a Concept Artist’s point of view.
There’s just so much you can do trying to make a bladder under formaldehyde to fit into a video game.

Talking about things to sketch in a museum, while there we also found out that there’s a wonderful exhibition, Animal Inside Out, going on at the Natural History Museum until the 16th of September.

The exhibits in Animal Inside Out are preserved using ‘plastination’ by the team behind Gunther von Hagens’s famous Body Worlds exhibition.
I saw von Hagen’s Body World in Vancouver in 2010, this one seems as interesting without being as creepy, I wonder how my 5 years old daughter would like it.

by Paolo Puggioni