Friday, April 30, 2010

Yoga Skeleton Prehistory 2: William Blake Edition

Since I'm not planning on posting any skeletons in yoga asanas until June, I figured that I would let you in on some of my development in drawing skeletons. On the right you see a skeleton that William Blake did for his illuminated poem The Book of Urizen. I first saw this image several years ago when I took a class on Blake. If you haven't read Blake, you should. Here is a link to the William Blake Archive. Straddling the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Blake tried creating a new mythology of his own. In addition to being a poet and artist, he also was a master engraver who did illustrations for other author's books. He hand water colored each of his illuminated poems.
On the left is one of my first recreation of Blake's skeleton. I drew it in ballpoint pen. All of the skeletons that I drew before this were extremely cartoonish and weren't referenced toward anything. At least this one was referencing I've drawn a skeleton in this pose maybe a dozen times. When I worked at a call center I wore a small version on the back of my badge dangling from a jolly roger lanyard. In order to illustrate how little I knew about human anatomy then I have included the following pages from an anatomy text atlas.Go out and read some Blake (preferably illuminated), and listen to some Acid Bath.

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1 comment:

eber said...

I really like these, thanks for sharing!

 
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Heavy Metal Yogi by Nick Matthaes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.