Family Activity: Making Lantern Slide Specimens

Drawing inspiration from Henry Clifton Sorby's lantern slide specimens, create your own creatures using light, inks, and paper.  

In this hands-on session, you’ll have chance to experiment with translucency and colour to craft unique designs. 

Henry Clifton Sorby was a marine zoologist who pioneered a distinctive preservation technique that rendered specimens translucent while retaining their vivid colour. This allowed him to mount them as projection slides – known as "lantern slides” – to display marine life to large audiences.  

You can see some of his original slides on display in the exhibition, Gathering Landscapes: 150 Years of Collecting at Weston Park Museum