Marlin Peterson

I am finished with my paleo painting!  It was quite the diabolical time sink, but I am quite pleased with how it came out.  I have painted many discrete subjects over the years, but creating a fully rendered environment in and around a given creature is a full-on leap in complexity and dimensions.  Gotta “cut your teeth” on a project of this magnitude at some point…might as well be when you should be packing to leave for Sulawesi and have no time anyway.

I worked on this digital painting in ways that I never could on a traditional (i.e. gouache or acrylic) painting.  For example, I painted all the characters first, and created the background around them.  What are perhaps my favorite benefits of pushing pixels on a monitor- rather than traditional art- are the endless ways to manipulate specific layers.  One has the ability to work on a background behind the foreground, play with the nuances of opacity (so awesome), and pick the perfect color immediately.  But perhaps most valuable of all is being able to experiment in a direction for a time, to realize it isn’t going how I want, so I can delete what I did or backtrack and continue in another direction.  These 4 aspects are invaluable.

What I lose in doing a digital piece are the tiny little accidents of color and form that happen in traditional painting.   And perhaps better posture?  I became a hunched vulture laboring over my wacom tablet.  Click these words to check out another painting I did of a: Diatryma in the Chuckanuts This was entirely acrylic paint so you can contrast these two pieces.  What do you prefer about each?

I tried very hard to turn the whole process into a video, but sadly it wasn’t to be:  I was unable to find the right automated screenshot recording software (anyone know what I can use?).   While I was squandering my time researching software instead of painting, the videos I had used in the beginning were really poor resolution and I gave up.  But I had the idea to make each flattened layer a different frame of a time lapse video, so stacking all them together will be an upcoming project.

I loved thinking about this incredible time to be on the planet.  Washington in the tropics teeming with tapirs, creodonts, and giant flightless birds- wickedly sweet!  The creatures that evolved to fill the Cenozoic vacuum left by demise of the dinosaurs are endless daydream fodder for me.  If anyone knows anyone with a time travel device, we need to talk.

Please let me know what you think!   Enjoy!

The acronym to know is GAP: Grants for Artist Projects.  It is part of Artist Trust, a Washington organization that hooks up artists with grants.  An incredible resource that I am so honored to receive.

To make a long story short, after months of waiting and wondering, I just found out I was selected!  60 artists from authors to musicians to photographers were picked out of 600 some applications.  I am beyond stoked.  I now have funding for the paint and to rent a boom lift to reach those hard to reach places on walls that are way beyond the reach of an aluminum ladder.

My project on their website is as follows:

Marlin will use 2011 GAP funding to paint a large public mural in Seattle that is both staggering to the viewer for its size and subject, and amusingly perplexing for its “trompe l’oeil” realism. The majority of the cost will be the rental of a boom lift to reach high onto the wall. This will allow the mural to be able to be completed fast, and give it the great size and scope that will make it a landmark and an icon.

What this description leaves out is what I will be painting on the wall in question.  What exactly is “trompe l’oeil”?  Good question.  It is French for ‘deceive the eye’. Basically it is painting extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.

My mural will be 2 huge, huge Opiliones arachnids hanging out like we always see them, casually and vertically on a wall.  They will be approximately 1 zillion times life-size, depending on the wall site I get.  To achieve the trompe l’oeil effect, I will utilize my years of scientific illustration to sketch the cuties from real specimens.  But perhaps most important will be shiny highlights added to the exoskeletal plates, and the drop-shadow effect I will paint onto the flat wall.  It will appear that the Daddy Long Legs are casting their shadows from our very own midday sun.  Why I chose them as my subjects are their long legs; particularly how the shadow will pop their little round hub-like bodies way off the wall when the shadow is done correctly.  To do this I will make miniature models of them and shine lights at the ideal angle to project the perfect “drop shadow” for that site, so that hopefully to the passersby it appears that the beautiful beasts are indeed 3 dimensional.

If anyone has ideas for the perfect smooth wall in Seattle, I am all ears.

Please let me know what you think!

These pictures are from the huge landslide that has yielded all the amazing fossils I am illustrating lately.  It was in this slow churning slurry that the Diatryma footprints were found on a slab…making history!  Also tree ferns, palms, tapir tracks, heron tracks…a detailed account of a tropical universe that existed here 50 million years ago.

My friend George and I were there when it was fully raining, and although you wouldn’t think that it was an opportune time, the wetness on the rocks made everything much more visible.

There were fossil plants EVERYWHERE.

What was overwhelming and sad was the toll the shale was taking by being exposed to the elements.  Just sloppily crumbling in your hand at the slightest jostle.  Incredible fossils all around you, exposed for this instant in time only to be reabsorbed back into the earth this winter.

It was one of the tippy-top geologic moments in my life to see all this first hand.  I have to go back!  But it might be under snow for now…

updating you now, I have just come up with this comp for the creodont that is about 80% finished.  I think I will give them some “flair” in the form of stripes or facial coloration or leopard stripes…any suggestions?

This is a preliminary sketch for a painting I am working on.  It is a Paleo-reconstruction of a scene from the Cenozoic which will focus on predation among a few common mammals of that time.

This crazy creature is actually an ancestral female tapir attempting to shield her young from marauding carnivores.  (Tapirs are alive today and are so cool to check out at a zoo!)  Surrounding her curiously and opportunistically will be a few Creodonts.  Note:  there are no creodonts at zoos, nor on our planet, and you should be grateful.  They were the dominant predator in North America for many millions of years; they might have hunted in packs and behaved much like the cooperative hyenas of today, but might not have.  One interesting thing that we do know is that Creodonts didn’t have much in the way of stereo vision, so that would have affected their hunting style and approach…hmmm, how should I translate that into this depiction?

Each of these have left fossilized tracks in stone in Whatcom county, in Washington state, and this painting will be for a display for Western Washington University.  I am still deciding on the coat for the Creodonts, so any suggestions are welcome!

I created this image of my cousin for her graduation card.  She has a passion for rowing crew and playing the violin, so I thought it would be a fitting image to merge the two.  I didn’t have much time to complete it so after drawing a quick pencil preliminary sketch (that didn’t look much like her), I used photoshop to distort and play with proportions.  I then painted it all in photoshop. 

She hasn’t seen it yet, so I hope she thinks it looks like her!

This incredible beast of a bird ambled around North America during the Eocene.  I was so happy to be commissioned to illustrate this bird in its paleoenvironment, especially since I was given the challenge to display features that hadn’t really been illustrated before.

The impetus for this was that in Whatcom county in 2009, there was a large landslide that revealed sandstone slabs from the Eocene.  Incredibly, this was the first time that tracks of a Diatryma had been revealed to us through geologic time!  There have been many fossils uncovered, but what amazing new angle that these tracks showed paleontologists was that this lumbering giant’s “talons” left no mark in the soft sand as it passed by that day 56 million years ago.   What does this mean?  It suggests that the bird indeed had reduced claws.  What does that mean?  Being that this fossil lacked a hooked beak, (as almost all living birds of prey that hunt or scavenge have), and the fact that its claws didn’t depress in the soft sand lead many to believe that it is further confirmation it was a peaceful foliverous/frugivorous/vegetarian animal.  (Admit it, you viscerally want a 7 foot tall bird to be a terrifying carnivore….admit it!)

With the closing of the Mesozioc and the death of all of the beautiful dinosaurs, there was a huge void left in lifestyle niches that were wide open to exploit for whatever animals made it through the extinction.  Filling this was our fair Diatryma that stood at a mighty 7 feet tall, and weighed perhaps 400 pounds.  What is very striking is the massive scale of its head.  It seems vastly overbuilt for the purposes of clipping vegetation but between perhaps cracking really hard things and sexual selection, it sported a beak that was about a foot long, very tall, and very thick.  Compare that with any other bird head/beak living or extinct- the elephant bird of Madagascar, moas, cassowaries, ostriches…their heads and beaks are all much smaller even if the birds themselves are larger or taller.

Even with all the data we have distilled about this animal and its habitat, I was still left with many decisions to make.  What kind of plumage?  more like an ostrich or a kiwi or a rail?  What colors would the plumage have?  Should it carry up its neck and cover its head?  How many chicks?  What setting should they be in?

I did a lot of research on the many anatomical and other details I needed to resolve before starting, but it was a exhilirating project that I hope to do many more of.  I love extinct animals, the early Cenezoic, Braeburn apples, and fossil reconstruction….3 out of 4 isn’t bad!

I did many sketches of the angles I could show it from, but in the end chose one, transferred to my canvas, then got cracking on the painting.  I used all acrylic paint, and may even take it a little further digitally.  I also set up a web cam for time lapse video capture!  Soon when I have some more time to learn the editing software, I will be able to post a 2ish minute movie of the whole process.  I can’t wait!

Let me know any questions you have about the process, what you like or what you feel should be different….in fossil reconstruction no-one is 100% right!

I did this logo for a friend who is a pastor at a church called “Engrafted Word”.  They needed a simple black and white logo that would translate well onto decals, embroidery, tiny web icons, and whatever else they planned to use for their church.  Here are various iterations of the logo in progress.  We chose the last one.

I was commissioned to take the composition of a photograph of this father and his son to become illustrated analogous versions of Captain America and his sidekick Bucky.  The setting was to be the aftermath of a serious battle with copious bodies and smoke- like any decent battle has.

The part that was most fun was was definitely transforming Bucky’s uniform down to toddler size.  While researching the comics and graphic novels, it was fascinating to see all the iterations the uniform has gone through over the eons that Capt America has been around.

We initially discussed making it a physical painting, but after seeing all of the Capt America art that he most wanted me to draw inspiration from, (and recreate the style of…which btw was all digital), we realized it should be digitally painted.

I started off with a fairly tight pencil sketch of the heroes with their uniform details, transferred that to photoshop, then began the task of building masks and layering up the paint and brush strokes.

This piece was a commission to be something nautically inclined, with crabs being foremost among the themes.  Given the opportunity, who doesn’t love crab and shrimp feeding appendages up close???

Cancer productus is a native of our fair Puget Sound waters, and is carnivorous- wasting no time wasting barnacles by crushing them in its pincers.  This piece is fairly large, 24×48 inches, and was fun to do because of the diversity in colors and textures.  I took some liberties to stylize some of the forms in pushing it further into the camp of “art”, and I am happy how it turned out- real close to what I had envisioned before I started.

This won’t be my last crab!  The next painting should be an even closer look at those wicked apparatus, (which by the way is the plural of the singular apparatus!)

I volunteered at the Burke museum on Saturday for their biggest day of the year, (in terms of visitors).   There were Paleontologists and the like all over the place, each with their own area or table.  I helped out in the art zone.  The tables where the kids did their art was mostly a tracing station, but given the kids ages, it was set up well for them.  I saw to it that there was enough paper for the kids to color on, and then later in the day I set up shop in the front to draw dinosaurs and kids would come and watch.  It was very cool.  Inevitably I had to field “dinosauria esoterica” questions from geeky kids that I often didn’t know the answers to…how disappointing for them!  But in the end I think I forever made a critical difference at critical junctures in the lives of dozens of kids.

This incredible bird is unique for several major reasons, least of which is its incredible plumage!  I decided to illustrate perhaps the most intriguing aspect of its anatomy…its foregut.  This bird is unique for its huge crop, which makes up 25% of its body weight.  Normally in birds edibles are digested relatively swiftly in the hindgut, but the hoatzin has this enlarged crop that is basically a big vat of fermentation and microbial breakdown stuffed with stinky leaves.  It may retain the leaves for 1-2 days, and the hoatzin spends much of its time stooped over, waiting for the slow release of the nutrients.  The crop is in fact so important, evolutionarily speaking, that theflight muscles and associated keel and sternum have both been reduced to give it more space!  It is consequently a weak flyer.

While I am on the subject, lets talk about other hoatzin oddities.  The chicks when born have a little clawed hand to go foraging among the trees when its parents are away!  It is also a way for them to avoid danger as the nests are set up over water, so that when a threat comes the chick drops into the water, and later climbs back to safety when the coast is clear.  A vestige of its dinosaur lineage?  Interestingly coots also have little single claws on their upper appendages too.

Here is an image composite I created showing what is digital and what is the base painting.  I first found some reference images taken at an upward angle.  I made a prelim sketch, resized it for the illlustration board I planned to use, transferred the lines, touched up the lines further in graphite, then began painting it all in gouache, laying it down light in the beginning, and working darker and darker.  But what this image shows is how much mileage I got out of the digital side of the rendering.  As you can see the sternum and crop have many levels of opacity interplay, so sweet with digital.  But especially feathering some of the feathers made it a lot softer and downy looking.

Let me know what you think!

I painted this Hippopotamus for the perennially lovely Christine for her birthday.  It was only 4 years late, but I made up for that in the size…it is 24×48″ and mounted above the kitchen windows.  I also took a time lapse of this so I hope to get that up soon.

There has been some discussion on changing the color of the water to look a little less like blood…but it was valentines day!  Relajate amorcita!  Dije no es sangre, es el color del corazon!

Sometimes our beloved pets feel we don’t quite go far enough in demonstrating our love for them.  That’s why here at MarlinPeterson.com we have developed a fresh approach to addressing the needs of your pet.

Imagine what a painting of your pet’s portrait on a wall could do for your relationship?

Any size piece or medium can be tailored to match your adorable animal with your discriminating decor.   With post-economic-crisis prices and the holiday season fast approaching, there is just no better time to take advantage of a starving artist.

I just need a picture and the final size you want to get started.

The mural is finished!  It was a fascinating process, and being part of the neighborhood for a few weeks while passersby stopped to check out the progress was so cool.

It was sweet that the city of Tacoma had the wall prepped and painted our chosen blue color for us.  The only major obstacles were the late season, (which brought minimized hours of light and rainy weather), and the deep, deep recesses of the grout that had to be meticulously dabbed with small brushes to drive the color into them.  We certainly used the rough surfaces of the brick to our advantage, giving swaths of color a stipple effect in its gradation, but large sweeping motions across the wall had to be touched up into every grout cavity!  It was tedious, but the outcome was worth it….I can’t believe how well we masked how rough the wall was!

We had worked on a few iterations of the idea in our preliminaries, but only minimal color studies so we worked it out as we went along.  here are some of the original sketches:  

…millipedes, tires, blackberries, her setting was not set even as we started to apply paint to wall.  I am happy with the grass we chose though- the varying blades and swaths of color gave it more dimensionality and really tied together the floating community elders with the girl staring at the slug.

Jeremy was awesome to work with, we gave each other advice and truly respected each other’s opinions as we bounced ideas and techniques off each other all day. 

At first there was talk and then a date for a community “unveiling”.  Not knowing what to expect, I was shocked at how cool it was.  The wall was covered in a plastic curtain (!), the mayor showed up to speak, we were given framed appreciation certificates, and we painted our names on the bottom corner.  I was so happy to get a formal shout out of appreciation!  I am now hopelessly hooked on murals, and just large public art in general, and I really look forward to making more murals in the near future. 

Click here for an article from Tacoma Spaceworks

Here it finally is!  cool to have it in my hand to behold how true to my illustration’s colors the printed page is.

I did a logo-type graphic for a client who owns the Cedar Mountain Mandolin Company.  He makes awe inspiringly beautiful mandolins, and I got a tour of the shop and whole operation.

On the inside of a given mandolin, there is a decal you can peek in to see a few details about the it.  Besides the iconic graphic/company name, there is the signature of the maker, the number in the series, the date it was produced, the model number….There are a lot of things you might want to know- consider how long an instrument like that will be around!

The client chose the logo on the left.

In rendering the logo, it was tricky to make a cedar tree that was recognizable as such, but with strokes sparse enough that it would have that “rustic” feel, and yet translate well to a 3 inch by 2 inch wide oval!  that is not a lot of space to work with.  You can see the other versions are completely different pen drawings of varying complexity or simplicity.

I will include images when I see the actualized decal in a mandolin.

These strange bike-rack donkeys are part of a logo I did for a client/friend who makes bike panniers in Chile.   The name of the company is Bici-Burritos, which mean that these sturdy lil’ bags are donkeys for your bike!  He wanted the imagery, (and name for that matter), to evoke the “haul-everything” spirit of the tireless little burro. But these burros you don’t have to beat constantly to get them to do what you need them to do, like you do with most other ones.  They just obey.

You can see a few versions of the final illustration.  It was a little tricky to show the donkey from the back to accentuate the panniers, yet still make it read as a donkey, and for that end to get a head in there.  Oh, and make it straddling a bike like a rack.   But I think it came out well.  I did several pencil concept sketches using tracing paper, and did the final using scratchboard.

newly hatched mantispid larvae await the ride of their lives

..but I would love to be convinced that there is something even cooler.  The larvae of the order Neuroptera have the most incredible repertoire of ambush predation…someday I hope to illustrate the best of them!

This illustration was by far for me the most fascinating to research and I learned about this creature in so many ways, on so many disparate levels.  It could very well be the coolest creature on our planet today.

I feel bad for the spiders, but all life on the planet is preyed on from microbes or fungus on up at some point in their existence.

let me know what you think!  or if you know of other crazy relationships among insects and spiders!

tenderly feeding from within the protected eggsac

This June I again taught “science art” classes at Collins Elementary school in Tacoma….it was an incredibly rewarding experiencee, with much to learn for me and the kids. I taught 10 different classes over 3 days, and our projects ranged across the board-all of “natural” subjects that either the teacher or I chose.  We made puffins, tortoises, dragonflies,  salmon, crabs, goldfish, red-eyed tree frogs, and a geologic cutaway of the subduction zone below Western Washington state!

The vast differences between 2nd graders and 5th graders were astonishing, but overall I think that the step-by-step processes, media, and subjects that I came up with for each class were excellent.  We used colored pencils, watercolor, crayons, and chalk pastels.  They were all challenged, (including a few tears) and most all felt very accomplished at the end of their creations.  I just couldn’t believe how absolutely thrilled the kids were to be doing art; the teachers sadly confirmed that they did basically no art at all throughout the year.

With about an hour for everything: preliminary sketch, paint “theory”, painting, then touch up, we had to hustle.   Many of the kids had never painted anything before…I was their first!  What a burden to see to it that the kids didn’t develop any bad habits yet!

It went great, and I hope to teach more art in the future…I would like to try older kids too, I think a jr. high or highschool-age project/combination of science and art would be so cool to create .  I will keep you updated.   Enjoy the pictures.

Recently I was commisioned to do a painting of a particular type of beetle called a Staphylinid, (aka Rove Beetle).  This beetle’s latin name is Zalobius nancyae. Of course I was very excited to do a large “habitus” of this fascinating and ancient lineage, but I had no idea how small it was until I was handed the box with the specimens inside.  We are not talking about long-grain basmati, this was more like a runt-sized grain of short grained rice:   TINY.

As I do not own a stereo microscope, I had a major dilemma in making my preliminary sketch accurate- actually making one at all!   But without too much having to dig around and research, I was soon offered use of the stereo microscopes in the back room at the jewelry shop where my sister works..thanks Sarah!  I sat down to do a large shaded pencil study of the details, with notes on shading patterns, hairs, and glare.  (I then reduced the prelim sketch down for the transfer).
I decided to use gouache for its amazing blending properties, and how rich the tones can be by layering more and more and more swaths of color.  Artists of any medium must always be patient to push on through the “ugly” phase of a painting, when it appears flat and dull.  This illustration certainly had that stage, but truly I live for the last moments of a painting like this when I get to add the glare, and the drop-shadow…utterly rewarding!

It does this amazing dimensional transformational thing where it just starts to bulge and warp in waves right up off the paper.   I  just finished the piece last week, and I am quite cheeky with it…check out the nice version of it in my portfolio- there is no tissue-paper smudge protector around that version!

I did this image of a salticid, (also known as a jumping spider), in mid flight. What is coolest about it is that it is from a vantage point that you could never really photograph.   They are one of the many cool spiders that DO NOT make webs to catch prey, but are inquisitive, extremely intelligent, active hunters that launch themselves airborne onto their unsuspecting prey.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my web-bound spiders.  But that they normally rely on vibrations and not visual cues means that evolution has dealt them a hand of very poor vision.  Salticids, at the opposite end of the spectrum, have evolved one of their pairs of “median” eyes to become greatly enlarged, so they have incredible vision. They can even move their eyes independently, and relative to most other invertebrates, focus on subjects far from themselves.

They are also known for their deft ability to learn and solve problems in approaching prey.  Often in search of the best angle to approach their unsuspecting prey,  salticids, (specifically Portias) have been observed taking such far flung routes to reach the prey that they break visual contact with it!   check out this wikipedia description on Portias:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_%28genus%29

In making this illustration, the most difficult part was figuring out the posture of the legs.  You can imagine how impossible it is to observe a jumping spider in mid-flight…just watching one move from place to place, it happens so fast you never even see the inbetween, just poof! and its on the next leaf.  I am lucky enough to have captured a partial stereo image of a jumping spider jumping toward the lense bracket of my macro camera!  So I was able to use it, and other generalized illustrations, like in Rainier Foelix’s book on spiders, to come up with this illustration.  I loved doing it, and hope to illustrate many more salticids.

these R's are the createvolution of this logo going from pen to pixel

This series of R’s is the evolution of a logo I designed for a client called Rev’t Resource.  It is a company that does the engineering busy work for the pipe and duct systems in buildings.  Pipes, blueprints, and 3-dimensional were the themes to employ.  The first digital concept “sketches” were a bit too “artsy” for him, hence the transition toward more exactitude and dimensional alignment.  He chose the far right image in the end.  Click on the image twice to make it big.

Cassava is a profoundly vital plant that can take credit for sustaining millions of people (i.e. poor farmers and their families) every day across the tropics, especially in Africa.  Africa produces more than the rest of the world combined for many reasons: it grows well in poor soils, is drought resistant, and can be left in the ground to be harvested when convenient.  I am fascinated by the human and natural history of all cultivated plants (and thus foods), so I created this graphic to explain the journey this plant has taken from South America to the main staple of Africa.

My own first experience eating cassava dates back to when I visited Madagascar.  In the arid central south, it was sold ready to eat much like a baked potato.  I thought it was flavorless but tolerable, and I ended up eating a lot of it because it was the most accessible food and easy to carry on my bike.

Some years later when visiting Cameroon, I again ate a lot of cassava, but this time pureed, boiled, then cooled in a long rubbery baton du manioc called “Mbobolo”.   It felt like a giant prosthetic ET finger!  You would unravel the cassava tube (~2 feet long and ~1 inch in diameter) from its tight banana leaf wrap, and dip the semi-opaque rod into a folded-banana-leaf satchel of spicy peanut butter.  Scrumptious.

And it was there in Cameroon that I learned that cassava had to be processed to be edible- well, I mean eaten without giving you goiter, paralysis, or disease!  There are malevolent forces (science calls it cyanide) ready to wreak havok when one eats cassava not thoroughly processed.  There are a few ways different culinary traditions do it, but generally it is to let it soak in water and ferment for hours or days.

check out wikipedia’s article on it   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassava

I made this graphic to showcase the incredible evolution of venom-injecting structures that these major groups of arachnids have independently arrived at.  The scorpion thru the telson, or the tip if the “tail”; the wolf spider (you can tell by the eye arrangement- check out the lower row of 4 eyes!) injects via fangs at the tip of its chelicerae.  Lastly the pseudoscorpion has venom administered via its vestigial pedipalps- it even evolved an opposable thumb to compliment it!  And we thought we were special?

This extremely tiny spider (~1mm across!)  is called Silhouettella assumptia and is from an elusive and little known family of spiders called Oonopidae.  They are known to lay people as the “goblin” spiders, but to latin linguists in labcoats the Oonopidae means egg-eyes.

3/4 view of the Oonopid Silhouettella assumptia

Illustrating a  spider requires special techniques.  They are different from insects in that their exoskeletons aren’t as hard all around- many parts will shrivel up so they must be stored in alcohol.  That’s why you don’t see all the gorgeous spiders of the world mounted in cases next to insects in Natural History museums!  (…but not to discredit the world’s bias for insects and against all things arachnid- it is real!!  you must teach the next generation to love them!)  For example if you try to dry and mount a spider, likely the abdomen will quickly resemble a raisin.  A terrible inconvenience.

For this project I had to keep the specimen submerged in liquid so that it wouldn’t dry out, and surprisingly (to me) sand is used at the bottom of the liquid petri dish to help steady it.  This enables me to study under a stereo microscope and a powerful light.   I also had access to “stacked focus” digital images if many different angles.  I had the experts around me at the Cal Academy to help me come up with the illustrated posture, (and crucially) the relative lengths of the legs.

I rendered the image in gouache, and stroked the many different colored hairs in colored pencil right over the paint…a great combination!   The original drop shadow I painted underneath was quite disappointing, so I opted to make a subtle digital one instead.

Are there any other spider lovers out there on the WWW?

my neuro-illustration on the cover of CAS proceedings

colored pencil head on inside

I am so excited that my habitus illustration of the Neuropteran Ceraeochrysa lineaticornis was chosen for California Academy of Science’s December 2009 newsletter.  I did the image for Norm Penny while doing an internship with the CAS, where I also rendered a sweet head profile of Ceraeochrysa smithi that was used for a different section of his genus revision.

This image was extremely fun to work on.  It was for an article for Natural History magazine about the triumphant success of so called Argentine Ants. I chose the “pioneer” theme of the wagon, bonnet, cowboy hat, aphid-oxen etc.  to make it a very easy to grasp visual metaphor.

After I had done it, I wondered if it would have been better to have the same main wagon but instead of the other following wagons, it would ride through a vast expanse of thousands of dead ants, (as the one in the foreground).  It perhaps would better suggest the unlikely success of “sweepstakes dispersal”.  Such an image would pay homage to  all the other ants that didn’t make it!

But I digress.  I am quite happy with the image, which is a combination of watercolor and digital coloring.

Back to the ants:  they are known scientifically as Linepithema humile and they have a tendency to become successful at exploiting niches at whatever hostile shore a soft pregnant queen at the brink of death happens to wash up on.

In short, they spend their efforts on food, (not warring with other militant ants), have a propensity to herd scale insects and aphids, and perhaps most importantly have an uncanny ability to intermingle amongst other “colonists”.  Here is a fascinating excerpt from wikipedia:

“They have been extraordinarily successful, in part, because different nests of the introduced Argentine ants seldom attack or compete with each other, unlike most other species of ant. In their introduced range, their genetic makeup is so uniform that individuals from one nest can mingle in a neighboring nest without being attacked. Thus, in most of their introduced range they form “supercolonies”. “Some ants have an extraordinary social organization, called unicoloniality, whereby individuals mix freely among physically separated nests.

In contrast, native populations are more genetically diverse, genetically differentiated (among colonies and across space), and form colonies that are much smaller than the supercolonies that dominate the introduced range. Argentine ants in their native South America also co-exist with many other species of ants, and do not attain the high population densities that characterize introduced populations.^“

I hope other illustrations like this one will come my way.

I hope you like it, let me know what you think.

I am super excited to attend (as a guest of Charles Griswold from the from CAS) the American Arachnological Society yearly convention held this summer in Berkeley!  Pretty convenient…I whipped up this collage to throw down on the odds and ends table for researchers to gnaw on.

Fascinating presentation topics coupled with crazy vocabulary, my favorite being footage of the hyper-flamboyant courtship displays of a certain male Salticid- it was somewhere between a bird of paradise, a crack junkie, and an alien vibrating back and forth, flashing all manners of iridescence.  And also super sweet were the slowed-down audio thumps of Lycosids drumming on substrates.

chefs duel over raw or cooked foods

This was an image I did for Science Notes for an online journal article.  check out the article here:

http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0801/pages/food/food.html

I ”drink the cool-ade” when it comes to cooked foods, so my embedded visual opinion on it is obvious:  you can tell the well-fed chef wielding the corn is going to win!  We (humans) got to where we are today because we burn the microbes and boil out the toxins that lie in wait for us!!!  Maybe the problem is that people who scamper around nit-picking their uncooked food never saw Quest For Fire?  Its our legacy…

were giant ground sloths responsible for the hugeness of this fruit?

This striking idea was fascinating to stumble on…Jon Wagner mentioned it to me in passing one day and shortly thereafter a wikipedia search revealed this curious mystery:

“The fruit is sometimes torn apart by squirrels to get at the seeds, but few other native animals make use of it as a food source. This is unusual, as most large fleshy fruit serves the function of seed dispersal by means of its consumption by large animals. One recent hypothesis is that the Osage-orange fruit was eaten by a giant ground sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement of North America. Other extinct Pleistocene megafauna, such as the mammoth, mastodon and gomphothere, may have fed on the fruit and aided in seed dispersal.”

I had to illustrate it then!  After rendering the skull and the tree foliage, I realized I had to take it a bit further to include the lips and tongue, and the moment of plucking one of these grapefruit sized fruits off the branch.  Perhaps to limit myself from criticism of discriminating against the other mentioned animals that might also have been dispersers, I need to do one of each of those as well?

Something certainly as fascinating and related to this subject are dinosaurs and their long dispersal relationship and coevolution with cycads.

ancient monkeys cross the narrow atlantic archipelago to arrive in the new world

When I first read a reference of the notion that monkeys accidentally rafted across the Atlantic to land in the new world, it spun my imagination like crazy!  I had so many questions, didn’t even know quite where to start, so I read a lot of research papers that took on the issue.

Back in the Oligocene,(23-34MYA), the distance between the Africa and South America was much smaller, the paleo-current ran straight from the former to the latter, and there was a volcanic archipelago betwixt.  There was no evidence of monkeys in south america before the oligocine, but all of the sudden there was a mass radiation of species discovering all kinds of untapped habitats once the pioneers in questions arrived.

I was able to even talk to the author on the phone and he steered me into understanding that this most likely wasn’t one event, but dozens or hundreds of events over thousands and millions of years moving steadily through the archipelago.  The involuntary monkey pioneers are believed to have inhabited one island after another, starting all over the colonization event to the next island west.

A troup of monkeys sleeping in a grove of mangroves that got slammed by a rogue wave, the gnarled mass of trees or vegetation detached from the land and over the next days or hours or whatever, a select group of monkeys drift out into the open sea until they land, (at best) on an island?  or countless versions of that happening over millions of years until a successful landing happened…what would that look like?

I decided to render this image in Acrylic paint, which is a newish medium for me.  It was quite exciting to work out, and to research this fascinating idea.  The painting is not finished yet, I need to add some leaves and more beleagered monkeys…in due time.

let me know what you think about the imagery

Finally we are to do a large project using scratchboard.  it is such an amazing medium…for how it looks, and for its forgiving nature.  Basically its paper coated with clay that you can brush or use a pen to get your blacks, then you follow up with a sharp stylus that scratches the black back away, giving you white lines over black.  All together you can do anything with it- I am excited to imagine a B&W illustration using scratchboard, then color it digitally.  The cleanest lines can be tidied up even tidier, and every gradation can be achieved.

For this image, I decided to research a broad spectrum of the animal kingdom and settle on an 7 team roster that had some of the largest eye to head ratios I could find.

Clockwise from the top left is a gecko, a jumping spider, a barred owl, a treesnake, red-eyed frog, a dourocouli, and in the center a preying mantis.

check out a larger image in my portfolio.

Those that know me, know me and my lady are David Attenborough junkies.  Life in the Undergrowth will always remain the best, but the Life of Mammals is obscenely sweet.  I especially was enthralled by the section focusing on termite eaters, and it was my inspiration for rendering this comparitive illustration.

This illustration was, for us, the first digital project of significance.  This project I intended to be a mock-up of a double page spread in a magazine, including text and all.  I decided to depict both of these animals feeding from the same termite mound, an impossible reality being they live in different regions of the earth, but one which exhibits how close their feeding behavior (and thus morphology/anatomy) is.

I did many sketches of the beautiful mammals using video, old illustrations, and photographs.  To figure out what the inside of a termite mound looked like, I found a researcher who poured plaster inside of the mounds, got rid of the hard exterior, and was left with a huge, white, complicated, sinewy system of tunnels and shafts for ventilation!  incredible to see  (I will try to upload a photo of it)

The white, hairy giant anteater inhabits South America, while the scaly brown Pangolin inhabits Asia and Africa, but they both have convergently evolved to take advantage of termites and to a lesser degree ants.  Long tongues, heavily muscled and and clawed forelegs for ripping into the hard superstructure…they were once lumped into the same order because of their similarites.

Seeing both or either of them in the wild is a life-goal of mine.  The closest I have been to seeing a Pangolin was in Cameroon stirring around in a soup of bush meat- sad beyond words.

illustration showing how 3 aquatic insects use the surface tension in water

I love the fact that many insects pass through an aquatic stage on their way towards maturity.  And those that spend their whole lives either in water, or never more than metatarsal-length away from it…fascinating!

The myriad different paths of evolution that those insects, (and arachnids for that matter) have evolved to make a go of it full time are just amazing to ponder.  I did this project to explore (just) 3 ways that 2 hemipterans and 1 coleopteran use surface tension differently.

The gerrid, (“water skeeter”) seems to hover on the water’s surface, propped up on its legtips inside concave cups of unpierced surface tension.  Its mindboggling to watch how quickly they beat their way across a body of water.

The gyrinid has a 2 pairs of eyes!  One to monitor what is going on above the surface, and one to track the comings and goings below.  It beats its paddle-like legs and rests “within” the surface…meaning a waterline bisects its gorgeous hydrodynamic curves.

The Notonectid is something like the Gerrid but in an inverse paradigm…it rests what we think of as upside down with its leg tips resting on the surface tension…but from below!  How cool is that?

the ratios of these insects to one another have been modified slightly to allow them to mingle comfortably on the page.  you can check out this image in greater resolution in my portfolio.

We all (15 of us) have met each other, the personalities are beginning to emerge, and the projects with their fudgeless deadlines have just begun to descend upon me.  We are starting with black and white, which seems fitting, and are steadily seeing on the horizon projects that will be rendered in pen and ink, (…funny term- is there ever a pen without ink?)

as for traditional media, all is done in pencil, and it was splendid just to hear someone explain the difference between H, HB, and B leads!   I could tell you but then what could I justify paying this frightening tuition for?

There is a huge case of shells and bones and pinecones and whatnot to inspire a first project…I wanted to do something that had’nt’ve been done yet…so I found this badass gourd at the grocery store, and decided to make the sweet warts and imperfections on it morph into the most fantastically patterned and delicate sea urchin “core”.  I was quite happy with the outcome, and here it is for you to see.  using all different leads was almost as crucial as reserving the whites!  I definitely grasped even deeper the utter gravity of ensuring that the preliminary sketch was dialed…but when is that not the case?

anyway, let me know what you think!

btw you can see a larger version in my portfolio gallery