Date: Tuesdays, September 24, October 8, October 15, & October 29, 2024
Time: 3:00 AM-5:00 PM Pacific Time, 6:00-8:00 PM Eastern Time
Level: Some experience with ink and watercolor helpful.
Medium: Ink and Watercolor
Supply List
Collecting Nature is back with four new subjects drawn from university and museum collections. Create your own “paper museum” that expresses a sense of wonder as you paint a series of natural history subjects with intention, beauty, and cohesion. Instructor Jean Mackay will take you behind the scenes of a different natural history collection during each session. She’ll offer layout ideas, provide a work-along demonstration of the main subject, and provide additional reference photos and online links to give you options for additional exploration and painting.
Sign up for one or more classes in the series. However, each class will draw upon some elements of the previous class to build your collection.
About the original Paper Museum: In the 17th century, Roman patron and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and his younger brother Carlo Antonio assembled a ‘Paper Museum’ of nearly 10,000 watercolors, drawings and prints, covering botany, zoology, ornithology, geology, architecture, and more. Their aim was to capture human knowledge in visual form. While photographs now dominate the 21st century record, a sketchbook can provide the perfect place to showcase your discoveries and to create a visual record of what’s important to you.
Session 1 (September 24): Sea Stars
Dive into the fascinating world of echinoderms, including sea stars, brittle stars, and sand dollars from the collection of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The Scripps’ benthic invertebrate collection contains 55,000 containers representing 800,000 specimens and 7,600 species from the world’s oceans.
Session 2 (October 8): Bird Nests
Sketch and paint songbird nests and a few eggs to create a dynamic page that draws on the ornithology collection at The New York State Museum in Albany. The museum exhibits birds of New York, but behind the scenes is a treasure trove of 20,000 specimens, including bird nests, eggs, and study skins.
Session 3 (October 15): Algae
Select from several varieties of algae to create a work of art that showcases the beauty and flow of algae. We’ll use pressed herbarium specimens housed in the digital collection at iDig Bio, an online repository for numerous universities and museums that houses 51 million media records. The herbarium records are among the most complete and include exquisite, pressed algae from the world’s oceans.
Session 4 (October 29): Butterflies
Learn how to unlock the incredible digital collection of the London Natural History Museum and paint the front and back of a single butterfly species. The museum has digitized its collection of nearly 1,000 paratype butterfly specimens—that is, specimens of an organism that help define what the scientific name of the species represents. Its online data portal allows you to explore and download the Museum’s research and collections data, including high resolution images.
