TRICK OR TREAT!

This is my favorite treat.  For those Reese's Peanut Butter Cup fans out there, you must try the Big Cup.  The chocolate to peanut butter ratio is perfect.  I love these so much that one of my best friends bought me 24 of them for my 24th birthday.  Needless to say, they didn't last very long.  

And Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.  I love it just as much now as an adult as I did when I was a kid.  I've been everything from a remote control, to Jane Jetson, to an Advil tablet.  This year I'll be attending a Halloween "Prom of the Dead" wedding!  I'm going as an electrocuted beauty queen of the 50's.  Sounds complicated now that I say it.  Hmmm....how do I describe it?  It involves a vintage bathing suit, vintage alligator skin pumps, frizzy teased hair, and a hair dryer in which I am entangled.  Ah beauty.

EEW! HOW GERMS SPREAD

We watched something really fun in class today.  Perhaps it's because I am in the process of getting over a cold and I sound like I have a rasp in my throat, but I was particularly fond of this short animation on NPR illustrating how a virus attacks the body.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114103980

IN WAVES OF THREE

In the interest of saving time, I am combining what could potentially be three different posts into one... 

1.  Taxidermy

2.  Storm remnants

3.  Discovery

TAXIDERMY

The Museum of Natural History Collection at UC Santa Cruz houses over 49,000 specimens of plants, fungi, insects, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.  For those of you who live in the Bay Area are probably familiar with San Francisco's Paxton Gate and Albany's The Bone Room.  Imagine the fabulousness of these two stores times four.    Most of these specimens are available for loan to the school's faculty, students and staff.  But because the Science Illustration Program used to be a part of UC Santa Cruz, the museum has decided to be nice enough to continue borrowing privileges to us.  So awesome!  I just borrowed a Hoary Bat and three Hawk Moths.

How beautiful are the feathers on this pelican???  Wow!

STORM REMNANTS

Last weekend, I went to Santa Cruz for a day to give surfing a go.  I'm not very good at it yet, but I'm working on it.  A few days before, the area experienced a pretty rough storm and the beach was just covered with washed up kelp and seaweed along with other fun finds.  One of them was a dead seal.  I know.  It's gross.  This one's skull was super exposed.  So much so that I admittedly wanted to yank the skull out and keep it.  I thought better of it and just took pictures of it instead.

DISCOVERY

Do you remember my drawing from awhile ago?  The one of the unknown flowering tree?   I know what it is!  It is called a Hakea Epiglottis and is part of the Protea family.  Now I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit because when I first saw the specimen, I remarked how much the bloom bore a resemblance to a tiny little protea.  Oh you can imagine how much I beamed with the recent discovery.   How did I go about finding out what my mystery tree is, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.  It was very profound and very difficult.  I asked a friend of a friend who happened to be a landscaper if he knew what it was.  Fortunately for me, he did!  I first described it to him and he said that he thought it was a hakea.  Then I showed him my drawing and he said, "Yup.  That's a hakea."  This particular species of hakea is native to Tasmania.  

LOTS AND LOTS OF LITTLE DOTS.....

KNOBBY STARFISH

Stippling -  an ever so time consuming yet beautiful rendering technique.  I think this may have been one of the most tedious drawings I have ever done.  But anyone who knows me knows that the more tedious and challenging the task, the more determined I am to see it through.  In other words...yes, I like to make things harder for myself than they need to be.  Yeah, so?  I know what you are all thinking!  I promise I have fun doing it and I love every second of it.  I went through at least 8 movies while drawing this.  Hmmm...let me think...I watched, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Little Miss Sunshine, The Departed, part of 50 First Dates, part of Old School, Napoleon Dynamite, and part of Princess Mononoke.  I suppose I really didn't sit there and watch them, but they were on in the background and they provided a great visual break from all of those dots.  

DIP INKED 4 TIMES

MAGNOLIA CARPEL  and AGGREGATE OF FOLLICLES- CLICK TO ENLARGE

So I am just loving being introduced to tools I have never used before.  Proportional dividers, calipers, gridded plexi, eye patches, and now croquill pens!  Today, we had a great demo on Dissecting Microscopes, but I digress.  Croquills are basically dip ink pens with nibs that come in different sizes and shapes.  This exercise was done with Hunt nibs 102 and 104.  The assignment was to draw the same specimen four times in line, parallel lines, cross-hatching, and stipple.  In doing this exercise it became very obvious which technique worked for the specimen and which didn't do anything for it at all.  I found that given the structural nature of magnolia carpel, parallel lines worked best.

I am very attached to these magnolia specimens.  I found them walking to work in 2003 when I first moved to the Bay Area.  This started my collection of natural specimen, and speaking of my specimen collection, here are some pics of things I've collected since then.

I took the above picture a few days ago with the intention of putting it up on my blog as "Things I'm Currently Drawing."  It never made it up in time so now I'm only drawing the starfish and skull.  I've obviously finished the drawing of magnolia carpels.  :)

MAP MAKER, MAP MAKER, MAKE ME A MAP!

MONARCH MIGRATION MAP

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, one of our classes is Information Graphics in which we learn techniques in Adobe's Creative Suite, i.e. Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.  So far we have been learning how to use Illustrator and our first assignment was to make a map.  I chose to map Monarch butterfly migration.  Although the work is very time consuming, I actually really loved map making.  There is something so satisfying about organizing information.  It was also really fun researching Monarch butterflies.  Oh the joys of learning things you never knew...

OH APPLICATIONS

LICHEN IN MUIR WOODS

FERN AT THE CONSERVATORY OF FLOWERS IN SAN FRANCISCO

I got my portfolio that I turned in when applying for the program on Monday and I still really like my drawings.  That's a good thing.  Sometimes you do things that look good right after they are done and you look back at it and think, yikes!  Anyway, just wanted to share them with all of you.

24 with 3

MY COLOR PENCILS NEATLY ORGANIZED BY COLOR

COLOR PENCIL EXERCISE

Due to the rain last night, much of Monterey experienced a power outage and we were without power for most of the evening.  I actually love black outs because it forces you to be inventive with your time.  My roommates and I decided to make our first fire in the working fire place.  It was too bad we didn't have smore making ingredients.  But we did have wine, and we did have our sketchbooks.  I did a little watercolor sketch of the fire, sorted my color pencils that up until this point had been a mixed bag of nuts, and penciled in a color wheel using only three pencils - process red, true blue and yellow.  It never ceases to amaze me that all colors can pretty much be made up of those three colors.  That and color swatches.  I still swoon every time I flip through a pantone color deck or pretty much anything organized by color.

AS PROMISED...

UNKNOWN FLOWERING TREE - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Here is the finished drawing from my last post, and my first drawing using an eye patch.  Well, I of course didn't use an eyepatch for the whole drawing.  I only used it when drawing the preliminary sketch through the grid.

I found this specimen on a walk to the park.  I have never seen anything like it before.  At first glance, it looked like a conifer of some sort, but on closer inspection, the tree was flowering.  So those pine cone-y looking things are in fact fruits and the things that have a remarkable resemblance to needles are actually leaves!  If any of you know what this is, please let me know.  Meanwhile, I'm going to look through books to see if I can identify it.

YO HO, A PIRATE'S LIFE FOR ME!

SPECIMEN SET UP

SPECIMEN SET UP

ARRGH!!!!

So why the eye patch, you ask?  Being a science illustrator also means I get to legitimately be a pirate.  I swear.  An eye patch was on our list of supplies.

As you can imagine, one purpose of a scientific illustration is accuracy.  One way of achieving this is setting your specimen up behind a grid and drawing over gridded paper.  This is a guide to correctly scale the drawing up or down while keeping the specimen's true proportions.  I've never used this method before and it is a lot harder than it looks.  I never realized that I move around so much when I draw and it's important to keep very still when using a grid.  It's also  tricky to see through the grid when both eyes are open and all of a sudden you're seeing 3 grids instead of one.  Hence the need for an eye patch!  In this case, it's better to use only one eye.

Check back in a few days.  This drawing will be done by Thursday and up on my blog shortly thereafter.   

FORM, LIGHT, and SHADOW

A LITTLE EXERCISE IN SHADING