Woodstock 1: Sheep Skulls

The first day at the Woodstock School of Art's creature design class was great fun. We had a congenial and talented group of people who came from as far away as Michigan!

The Woodstock school itself has a great tradition leading back to the 1930s, when it was a summer school for Art Student's League instructors, so I was thrilled to be there.

We started off looking at the history of how Pans and satyrs have been portrayed from Greek and Roman days all the way to modern movies and video games. We had a snack of goat cheese and crackers to get us in the mood (thanks, Jeanette!)

Then I brought in five skulls of deer and rams, so we could really study out the anatomy and the variety of horns. I'm holding Flynn, a ram I used to sketch from life years ago when he lived on the farm of a good friend.


We all did thumbnail sketches of a variety of character and compositional ideas, and then tried to "flesh them out" with studies from life.


One of the things I tried to do was to morph the ram's skull with a human skull to see what it looks like. Hmmm...a little scary...got to work on that.