sciencyartsythings - Tumblr blog

[sciencyartsythings]

Thanks for meeting up, Zack, and for sharing your incredible wealth of botanical knowledge! It was so great to meet you!

San Francisco botanical adventure day 3!

Today I met up with @sciencyartsythings to visit the California Academy of Sciences! The coolest part about this botany tumblr meetup? We were both interns at the Cal Academy during separate years, but didn’t know until we met up! What a serendipitous surprise! Thanks for the awesome hangs and for enjoying all the amazing plants with me :)

San Francisco followers! I am still in your beautiful city until Thursday and I have more botany to see! If you’re interested in meeting up and looking at plants together, send me a message and we will work something out!

-Zack

[sciencyartsythings]

Hi! + life update

Hey Tumblr,

Long time (like, really really long time), no update. I'm sorry for such a long absence! Last year, when I dropped off the face of the earth, I got so busy with school that I kind of forgot this site existed. Lately, I’ve been remembering how much I used to enjoy it and would like to start up this blog again. I know I've lost a lot of followers due to this page being dormant, but for those of you that are still here, thanks. =) Since my last post I have:

A. finished grad school

B. completed an internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

C. traveled around Europe (mostly Italy) for six weeks

Maybe I should make individual blog posts about each of those things? It's been a wild ride. I've had some major ups and downs, but overall, I'm so happy with the direction my life has taken. I'm a much happier, healthier person than I was a couple years ago. Now that things have slowed down, I've been hopping around between Ohio, Virginia, DC, and California, job searching, and just generally trying to figure out my life. This is the first time that I haven't known what the next step is, and that's a little scary. I would like to move back to California permanently, but I'm really open to go anywhere. Job searching has been frustrating, but I haven't lost all hope yet. Someone will hire me soon, right..?

Well, that’s a short summary. Thanks for listening! Here’s some pics from my experiences over the past year and a half or so. More to come soon, and more art to share!

My class and teachers at the opening reception of our final exhibit! I love these people so much and miss them terribly. <3

A conceptual project from school about conservation genetics, inspired by an article from Scientific American.

I learned how to mount herbarium specimens at the National Museum of Natural History! This was oddly thrilling for me. Such a plant nerd. =P

A botanical plate of Piptocarpha lechleri created for my internship at NMNH. It will be published in the new edition of Flora of Ecuador. =)

I did some sketching during my travels in Italy. This is the view of San Giorgio Maggiore from Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Obligatory selfie on top of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome!

[sciencyartsythings]

I'm so lucky to have such talented friends as classmates! Mattias is an amazing artist and person. He worked SO hard on this drawing! Glad it is getting the attention it deserves!

My talented friend Mattias Lanas is studying scientific illustration at CSU Monterey Bay. He recently drew this beetle via a process called stippling — IT’S ALL DOTS! Apparently it took 32 hours to complete …

Male ten-lined June beetle’s have incredible multi-layered antennae that they use to detect female pheromones.

[sciencyartsythings]

First field sketching project done! An exercise in using color. (drawn with watercolor and colored pencil)

[sciencyartsythings]

Today, we went to the natural history collections at UC Santa Cruz to rent out specimens! I brought home a leafhopper, scarab beetle, and a kestrel. BEST DAY.

[sciencyartsythings]

This was my classroom today. #nocomplaints #fieldsketching #pleinair #Carmel (at Carmel River State Beach)

[sciencyartsythings]

Well, I finished my first week of grad school and have started my second week! I've gotta say it's going pretty well. =) My classmates are all amazing, super impressive scientists/artists and even better people. With all that they have to brag about, they're incredibly humble about it all, which helps me forget about my inferiority sometimes. =) To all of you who responded to or liked my last post about being crazy nervous on my first day: thank you!!! It made me feel so much better! I promise I'll post some art here soon. I have five different drawings going on already, but none of them are finished! Soon.

[sciencyartsythings]

I'm starting grad school today and I'm really nervous. Like, I feel nauseous and have been awake since 5 am. I met some of my classmates last week, and they're all amazing. I don't understand how I even got into this program. Sorry this post doesn't have any pretty pictures or anything. I just needed to say this somewhere. Fortunately, grad school means I'll probably be posting art on here more often. =) At least I think that's a positive thing... Unless it just clogs up your dash, in which case, I apologize in advance. 

[sciencyartsythings]

Woah, it’s been a really long time since I’ve updated this blog. Sorry tumblr! I’ve sort of neglected social media all together this summer.

So here’s a big update for all of you!

I finished my BFA thesis, successfully defended, and graduated! Yay! After months of worry and imagining the worst possible outcome, my thesis exhibit and defense were actually very well received and I was SO happy! I was even selected as one of the school’s top 20 graduating seniors! Woohoo! That award qualified me for a group of travel scholarships, which I did not end up winning, (sad face) but I was still super happy to get top 20.

Here is my whole exhibit! Yay! The center had a giant Photoshop painting of a healthy ecosystem on the left fading into an ecosystem overtaken by invasive plants on the right.

The left side of my exhibit had big printouts of all the spreads from the book.

The right side of my exhibit displayed all of the original drawings included in the book. Drawings on green backgrounds are invasive plants, and drawings on blue backgrounds are native plants. The book is color-coded in the same way.

This table had a few prints of the book for people to look through and some prints of the plants as a free take-away.

I made the top 20! Yeah! As a side note, you can see I have a pretty crappy little name plate for my exhibit as a last minute solution to a certain vinyl lettering debacle. I said my exhibit was well received, not that it was perfect. Lol.

As you can see in the pictures above, for my thesis, I wrote and illustrated a short field guide to invasive aquatic plants, which is now being used locally. I’d been consulting my local park system, the Cleveland Metroparks, on my thesis project, and two days after I defended my thesis, my contact there called to say they found funding for my project! Because of this funding, my summer has been filled with work to expand my aquatic plant field guide and designing a website about general invasive plant control. The project is funded by the National Park Service, and my book will soon be published and distributed to help invasive plant control everywhere! Woohoo! Additionally, this job has been a huge help in paying for my graduate school expenses, as I’ll be starting that new chapter of my life quite soon.

Here are a few spreads from the book:

Another big part of my summer has been getting ready and getting excited for grad school! I start my graduate education for Science Illustration at Cal State Monterey Bay in just a little under two months, and I am pumped! I’m also getting more nervous by the day… I’ll be moving across the country all by myself to a whole new place surrounded by all new people. I have no doubt that my Science Illustration classmates will be amazing! I just hope that I can measure up in such a talented bunch and that I fit in and am liked and all that jazz… I worry too much.

I guess that’s about it for now. To all of my followers: thanks for sticking with me in my absence. I hope you’ve all had an amazing summer!

[sciencyartsythings]

YES. A million times yes! I've encountered this so many times, and I wish that all potential clients would understand this. The work I do as a medical/scientific illustrator is WORK. It has value, and requires compensation. Exposure is not compensation. A page in my portfolio is not compensation. You know what is? A paycheck.

** This is a catalogue of a few things I’ve encountered recently; all opinions are my own. I have had my fair share of amazing clients and some wonderful collaborations. This is just trying to finally formalize the hard-to-answer and awkward situations; your own experiences or feedback is...

[sciencyartsythings]

I spotted a family of Eastern Screech Owls in my back yard today! I counted one adult and five fuzzy gray juveniles. They were chowing down on a chipmunk the adult had just caught. =) #EasternScreechOwl #owls #cuties #theylookangry

[sciencyartsythings]

Today was perfect for some outdoor sketching. =) #iris #micron #botanical #illustration

[sciencyartsythings]

Hello, I saw your post about your internship doing scientific illustration. How exactly did you get involved in that career? I'm interested in it as well, but I have no idea where to begin. How did you get started? Thank you for your time.

Hi! Thanks for the question! I've loved art and science my whole life, but I didn't realize I could combine the two until I got to college. I went to the Cleveland Institute of Art and majored in Biomedical Art, which trained me in both scientific and medical illustration and animation. I just graduated and am already loving this career! Glad to hear you're interested in it too. =)

To get started in scientific illustration, first it's important to get a good handle on drawing natural subjects accurately. I would suggest practicing drawing plants, animals, and insects as realistically as you can. Get used to drawing with traditional mediums like graphite, pen and ink, colored pencil, and watercolor; and familiarize yourself with digital art software such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign. Spend time at local scientific institutions, like natural history museums and botanical gardens to get access to a wide variety of scientific subjects for drawing from direct observation.

It's also important to research whatever you're drawing. Having a good understanding of your subject before you begin drawing is a huge help in ensuring accuracy. The goal of scientific illustration is to communicate and educate, so accuracy is really important.

If you're in college, I'd suggest majoring in fine art and minoring in biology or vice versa. If you can find a school that offers scientific illustration as a major, then that's even better! There aren't too many scientific illustration programs out there, but there's a few.

I could go on and on, but I'll stop here. Let me know if you have any more questions or would like more detailed info on anything! I'm happy to help! =)

[sciencyartsythings]

"Taken by Igor Siwanowicz, the photo shows the open trap of an aquatic carnivorous plant known as a humped bladderwort (Utricularia gibba). The plant floats in water waiting for its prey to touch its trigger hairs, which cause the plant to open its trap so quickly that it sucks in water as well as some unlucky microinvertebrates. The pretty little flakes near the bottom of the image are single-cell algae that live inside the trap. The image is magnified 100 times.” Via.

[sciencyartsythings]

Woah, this is AWESOME.

Australian scientists have proposed a new system of 3D imaging so entomologists can digitally share specimens (like the weevil shown above) in all their gross and glorious detail … and create larger than life 3D prints.  The system involves photographing insects from dozens of angles, and then using those images to construct a 3D model.

Hat tip to Geoff Brumfiel.

[sciencyartsythings]

37 ink drawings later, and my book is finally DONE! Gonna go take a nap now.

[sciencyartsythings]

Still drawing... #Hydrilla #BFA #thesis #sleepy #AmIDoneYet?