William Shakespeare

Now I'm not sure why we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death... I would have thought marking the anniversary of his birth was more uplifting... but there you go. What with everything bard I couldn't help but doodle this, just to see what I ended up with. Interestingly, while doing a quick google image search I happened upon some research that suggested Shakespeare may very well have had a bone tumour in his skull which could explain some of the unusual proportions seen in the most famous engraving of the chap on the title page of his first folio. I might have over emphasized this in my sketch, just a little... I also had a bit of fun with the 17th century practice of letter f's (actually "long s's" I learned) instead of s's (only seen with letter s's within words apparently...). Don't know if "toast" was really an appropriate word to use about his "demise" but I needed some s's.

"the rather interesting octopus" or ... nothing I could draw would make it any more bizarre than it already is !

The challenge with doing illustrations for my other [group] blog "A Little Bit Bunny" is to make the chosen creature of the month a little bit quirky... a wry sideways glance... or just downright odd. This month it's the octopus, a particular favourite of mine.

I started out with weird doodles that amped up the fact it has a beak (something easy to forget, being buried as it is beneath those 8 arms ... we're not to call 'em tentacles by the way...), then I played about with stylising the anatomy, but no matter what I did, nothing was as downright bizarre as the actual facts about this remarkable creature. So that's what I went with... cold hard facts and a picture of an octopus... simple and to the point I hope.  Here are just a few sneaky peeks of my final illustion. As always the final picture is over on ALBB.

If cephalopods (or indeed natural history in all it's many and varied forms...) interest you I can recommend a glorious collection of 19th century scientific plates from the voyage of the H.M.S Challenger (and here too) that I found while researching all this. Just a closing thought... I do feel guilty that I ate some of the best calamari I've ever had while sketching for this illustration... It did taste great though! Maybe that's another fact to add to my illustration, "squid and octopus taste very nice"...?