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Creating creatures from the bones

Creature Class workshop later this month.

You can’t know the creature without knowing its bones.

Artist, life drawing instructor, and illustrator Werner Zimmermann is conducting the Creature Class – a three-day workshop on the anatomy of creating great creatures. Bones will the foundation of the drawing work. It runs from June 21-23 at the University of Guelph.

“We’re using what I affectionately call the bone rooms - the collection of skeletons at the veterinary college,” he said during an interview in his upstairs studio on Wyndham Street downtown. His long drawing table is currently set with illustrations for an upcoming children’s book from Scholastic Canada.  

For over 20 years, Zimmermann has taught anatomical drawing for illustrators and animators at Sheridan, Humber and Seneca colleges.

“Skeletons are really important for creatures and humans, and we’ve recently had a lot of fun with creating creatures,” he said.

The workshop is for cartoonists, illustrators, graphic artists, and fine artists who want to expand their skills by engaging in the close examination of this somewhat more traditional drawing subject. The old masters of art were fond of bones, Zimmermann said.

Most every flesh and bones creature has a skeleton, and exploring those skeletons is a way into a deeper understanding of the creature, he said.

When an artist gets creative with bones, and takes liberties combining the skeletons of different animals, the results can get really strange and wonderful. He will encourage workshop participants to do just that.

The workshop costs $225 plus HST if you sign up by this Friday, June 10, and $265 plus the taxes after that. It is for anyone who draws. There is a 20-person limit.

“Anything goes,” he said. “The important thing is to really understand structure, and the skeleton is structure.”

Anatomy is a scary subject for many people, he said. But it is actually a fascinating subject, and not too scary at all.

“Leonardo da Vinci said, learn your bones, learn your anatomy,” Zimmermann said. “I take my students into the University of Guelph to study the human cadavers. Later this summer I’m doing two workshops on that.”

Skeletons are an amazing phenomenon, Zimmermann said. To ponder them is to discover the intricate and astonishing process that goes into their making.

“They’re fascinating, and they are underlying everything, even cartoon characters,” he said. “These characters I create for the kids’ book that’s coming out in the fall, there is a structure underneath.”

A skeleton, he added, is the clearest identifier of a living thing.

“To learn to draw is to learn to see,” he said. “And learning to see what makes a skeleton unique is probably the best exercise in drawing.”

Zimmermann, 64, is a multifaceted artist. He has done commercial drawings for airline companies, illustrations for books, ethereal drawings of people and animals, and many of his own skeletal drawings. Learn more about him and check out his work at www.instagram.com/man4art/ and at http://man4art.blogspot.ca/.


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Rob O'Flanagan

About the Author: Rob O'Flanagan

Rob O’Flanagan has been a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and columnist for over twenty years. He has won numerous Ontario Newspaper Awards and a National Newspaper Award.
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