These sketches were in my proposal for a National Geographic story on Tim Severin's Ulysses Voyage of Ulysses, a classic subject if there ever was one.
Book: Ulysses Voyage by Tim Severin
"As Helene Schjerfbeck could not speak English very well, she often worked alongside Marianne Stokes, and a child that they painted together a number of times was so naughty at school that the teacher was only too glad when she sat for the artists!" (Source)
Find a feather? What bird is it from?
By law you're not supposed to possess feathers from wild birds (in order to protect birds from being hunted for their feathers), but there are a couple of good websites to help with feather identification anyway.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has a website called Feather Atlas that helps you identify feathers based on color, position, pattern, size, and kind of bird.
Featherbase is another website focusing on bird feathers. The site lays out the feathers of a given bird, and arranging them in groups so you can see the variety of feather types that cover a bird's body.
I'm working on an article about the uses of tracing paper. I'm trying to recall all the varieties of transparent paper and their characteristics. If I've forgotten a type or overlooked some key information, please let me know in the comments.
• Flimsy | Lightweight and very transparent tracing paper in white or yellow. Resists bleed-through. Comes in a roll up to 48 inches wide by 100 yards long.
• Tracing paper | Most universal paper for sketching, overlays, corrections, tracing, and transfer. Usually sold in pads, quite transparent.
• Onion skin | A thin, light paper made for typewriters in a time when airmail rates demanded light weight. The slightly waxy surface allows for relatively easy erasures. Term “onion-skinning” used in digital world to describe the ghosted display of adjacent frames.
• Animation paper | Sturdy but translucent paper punched for alignment pegs and designed for pencil and pen.
• Layout paper | Smooth-surface bond, slightly transparent, takes markers without bleeding through.
• Cotton Vellum | Typically comes in rolls, made from 100% pure cotton fiber, archival, sturdy, and ideal for inking, transferring a drawing, or making a blueprint.
