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How to draw an albatross by Gabby Wood.

Before my appointment with the albatross, I planned to draw it differently.

We first met through glass.

The skeleton was in a cabinet in the museum, displayed on a high shelf.

If you looked up and dodged the reflections, you could see the curved

sweep of its beak, and the Z-shaped slashes of its vast folded wings. Diomedia exulands,

the wandering albatross, was an improbable bird, seemingly assembled from the disparate parts of

others, a dodo here, a seagull there, a wingspan from something prehistoric.

You didn't need to know what it was, or to be reminded of the Albatross's association with

luck or guilt or human burden, or even to understand how far this one must have travelled,

to see the majesty and melancholy in the creature's remains.

This was Coleridge's harmless bird that loved the man who shot him.

Boardlayer's King of the Blue brought stumbling and ashamed into the orbit of men.

You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology,

and the Arbitross would be taken out of the

cabinet so you could see it up close. As we are close to the public in the morning, the curator told me,

you will have peace and quiet to draw the specimen. I began my preparations. I wanted to make etchings,

which I was just beginning to learn to do. I brought a small torch so I could light the

skeleton and cast shadows that were turned into aquitants. I found photographs of other

albatross skeletons online and tried to map out a three-plate print separated by thin vertical

...