🐾 Animal anatomy and photo reference sites?
3yr
Harmony Steel
Hi everyone :) I’m drawing and painting a lot more animals than anything these days and I need to get serious about animal anatomy. Can anyone please recommend any good online reference photo sites, or animal anatomy websites? Even online museums, natural history places etc. Thank you 🐾❤️
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Cal Sink
@Harmony Steel I really suggest picking up Joe Weatherlies book the weatherly guide to drawing animals, and you can also learn a lot from his other available books, animal essence, animal nature, and sketchbook volume 1. I have talked to him and he has recommended the classic Ellenberger animal anatomy for artists book. It has been a great resource for me to get started learning animal anatomy. I dont have this, but if you have the money, get a model from juns anatomy, they are extremely useful for studying animal anatomy, and the surface forms.
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Harmony Steel
So I discovered two more possible resources, there's the good old pixabay.com - https://pixabay.com/ - of course and also Flickr Creative Commons search, e.g. https://www.flickr.com/search/?license=2%2C3%2C4%2C5%2C6%2C9&text=panda&advanced=1
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Dan B
Unsplash.com can be quite good for reference photos. There's also https://wildlifereferencephotos.com, but they have a watermark unless you pay... iNaturalist is also a great source for reviewing specific species (if not generic pets/farm animals etc). It depends on what animals, a lot of museums will let you search their specimen catalogs, but generally better for smaller things and they often just contain observation descriptions rather than photos (except invertebrates). Nothing beats a good old book though for technical references, i.e. Eliot Goldfinger or Ellenberger. Also have a look around at Veterinary sites (or youtube channels), they can be very good for detailed anatomy.
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Serena Marenco
I did not know iNaturalist! I'm going to see it!
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Harmony Steel
Awesome thank you so much Dan! Some great resources there I'm going to check out right now, thanks again :)!!
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Zoungy Kligge
@Aaron Blaise has a website heavily geared toward animal art resources called creature artteacher.com. I was telling someone today about an app called Handy that includes some 3D models of animal skulls as well
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Harmony Steel
Thanks @Zoungy Kligge much appreciated :)! Ah yes I know the website, I have a few classes from there, Aaron Blaise is amazing, I have such admiration especially for his work ethic. I will check out "Handy" as well, great tip, thank you!
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Harmony Steel
@Serena Marenco I am totally tagging you on this one 😁😁😁
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Serena Marenco
Thanks :p First of all I suggest this site which is very useful https://x6ud.github.io/#/ For the exercises I usually use https://line-of-action.com which allows you to make a certain selection among the species you want to draw. For the rest, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum gives you the possibility to make a nice virtual tour, I took advantage of it last year, when in Italy we were in lockdown and we could not even leave the house, to pass the time (I must say, however, that as a museum I was not thrilled, I find that the taxidermy collection of the unknown museum of Natural History of Genoa, which I have visited many times, is richer, especially for what concerns birds). London's natural history museum is much better. I see now that you can visit it on google art & culture.  https://artsandculture.google.com/streetview/the-natural-history-museum-hintze-hall/yQHjHCmSOMKyhQ?sv_lng=-0.1763002033314968&sv_lat=51.49614943214926&sv_h=308.26907700203446&sv_p=21.747201048821324&sv_pid=xCOPaa20DC3Z4eRiKDUyew&sv_z=1.0000000000000002 I've been there live and took several photos on the occasion, but they're not very good, there was a lot of crowd and it was difficult to approach the cases from the right angle to avoid reflections. Another thing I like a lot are the live cameras on youtube, if you search for webcam live animals you'll find a lot of them (lately I was following puffins hatching). Before the pandemic it was my habit to go in person to take photos, to avoid copyright issues, or to ask friends to send me photos from their holidays. In January last year I had planned a tour of zoos and natural history museums in Europe with a couple of friends/colleagues but it all fell through because of the pandemic. :(((
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