Notes on Bones

Knowing how bones work helps create convincing drawings.

Bones are our framework and support. They show on the surface of our body in bumps and dips that shift as we move. We lift our shoulder and the shoulder blade lifts; we lift our arm and a dent appears where tendons connect skin and bone. The bones of the elbow rock against each other as we flex our arm; the lower arm bones twist as we shift palm up to palm down. Learning bones helped my skill at drawing especially by sharpening my powers of observation.

I have been struck, also, by the way humans are structurally similar to all other animals. How ancient our shape is! We are bilateral, with spine and limbs, fore and aft, dorsal and ventral, just like the echidna or the turtle, the shark or the wolf or the deer. It’s remarkable to look at a horse and see how the same principles that underlie us also underlie them, even to residual fingers (one finger became the hoof but the others remain in reduced form under the skin). Animal structure is so visible, and also so utterly different from how plants are organized, with their alternating structural principles.

Anyway, here are a few of my drawings of bones, for your amusement. Some were made at the Smithsonian anthropological archives, and some in Paris at the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparatif.