This is Dusty, the bearded dragon, he's from Australia and currently lives with his mate, Matilda, in the Discovery Room at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, CT
The Big Brown Bats above were taxidermy specimens also in the Discovery Room.
But back to Dusty. A reptiles skin is really fascinating. The frill, the folds and all the scales and patterning were incredible beautiful, subtle and varied and that's what I wanted to focus on.
I started with a Gray Ultra Fine Point Sharpie which is a pen I've grown to like a lot over the past few months. Of course it's permanent and waterproof like all Sharpies but I like it because of its color. A soft, subtle gray that's perfect to begin a drawing with if you plan to work over your initial sketch with other media, which is what I often like to do. It's great because the line is a line that you can see, but it's also light enough so that it can disappear and blend into what goes on top of it. This is good because it allows you to correct and refine your sketch along the way, making incorrect lines disappear into further restatements of other media, in this case watercolor and brown marker, or keep the correct lines and they continue to have a presence in the finished drawing.
What a cool little critter!!!
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