Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/22/how-to-draw-natural-history-sp.html
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Just today I found a strange optical instrument in a drawer at work and upon googling its serial number found out that it was a camera obscura that attaches to a stereoscopic microscope to superimpose your pencil onto the microscope image for accurate drawing in what I assume is this sort of style.
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Video link for the BBS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Wjudlqg9c
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In an illustration class in college we used a similar technique for landscape drawings. Using a clear sheet of plastic mounted in a cardboard frame, a grid of black lines was drawn onto the plastic using a very thin marker. This creates the “graph paper” for the scene. Frame the scenery you want to draw with this graph sheet (for example, tape it to a window to draw what you see outside the window, or otherwise attach to an easel, etc…) then use that graph to help you keep proportions, and also to allow you to focus on smaller sections of the landscape one at a time, without being overwhelmed by the full detail of the entire scene all at once.
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So now all that’s left to do is to get the colouring and shading right.
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The tricky part is keeping your head in the same place. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kdN5113b3Gc/VKXEXq84feI/AAAAAAAAZbE/2k3avE0KH7M/s1600/Durer_Perspective.JPG
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That will get a plan view (but you will need to draw it from a plan position), but it won’t get you an illustration, for that you need either a perspective grid on your drawing surface or the grid in front of the specimen (a frame with wires stretched across or an acrylic sheet with lines drawn), you also need to keep your head in the same position.
Some artists like to make a virtue of their gridss, Uglow deliberately kept his marks on his paintings.
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That’s the idea behind the drawing frame in archaeology (and, I’m sure, other disciplines that record in the field). Of course these days we just use photogrammetry to rectify and trace photos of the features.
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In scientific drawing classes, it is hammered into students not to do shading. Dots are allowed, shading isn’t. And colour is a no-go for most scientific applications.
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Was following up on engineering techniques for art, but, yeah. OK.
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Don’t tell the ornithologists.
Debby Kaspari’s sketchbook from Barro-colorado island (some of them done through binoculars!)
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Looks like art, not scientific drawings. Just sayin’.
But you got a point - when talking about colouring, at least.
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I didn’t find it to be too tricky 
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