ANOTHER URCHIN

PENCIL URCHIN PAINTED IN PHOTOSHOP 

This pencil urchin might be one of the coolest specimens that I own. I got him at Paxton Gate in San Francisco. Do you like how I've assigned my specimen a gender? It's a boy. After determining that, I thought to myself, how DOES one tell whether an urchin is male or female? So I looked it up. It turns out that you have to pass an alternating electrical current of 10 volts through the animal and it will shed either its sperm or egg. Interesting.

Anyway, this is obviously just the skeleton, but the living urchin doesn't look that different.

This was done for our Design in Information Graphics class. The assignment was called 3-Point Lighting and the purpose of it was to capture a specimen in 3 different light sources - fill light, key light, and rim light. With these light sources you can capture a lot of volume with a lot of drama and effectiveness.