Marlin Peterson

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