The (mostly) completed AU field studies journal.

Check out what got delivered this week:

It's the first textbook I was contracted to illustrate, finally in print!

I did some thirty-odd images to accompany the text. Some of them were metaphorical or conceptual (like the tents in the first photograph, which illustrate the idea of protocols), while others were portraits, or depictions of straightforward manufacturing processes. The tiny painting of Bell (pictured above, in the upper right-hand corner of the right page) was the authors' favorite.

A big chunk of a serious education in the arts used to consist of copying the works of the old masters. So this past week, as I've been engaged in doing more historical copies (works of the older masters) for the horse book, I feel like I'm in the spirit--if not the continent or style--of the practice!

Here's my rendering of some petroglyphs in Mongolia (which after researching, I now desperately want to visit, by the way):

....from Egypt....

...and a bison robe from not-so-far-away Taos.

More illustrations for the horse book. The author wanted a couple of ancient art pieces, depicted in paint for clarity and emphasis. The first, an image from a cave wall, was fairly easy and fun to do...

The other was a particular section of the Bayeux Tapestry--she wanted it bright, and bold, as though we were seeing it freshly-embroidered, so a photograph wouldn't do, even if good detail shots were available on the cheap (which they're not).

I have a pretty good sense of how quickly I can paint something of a certain size, and had this been a painting of a photographed scene, I could have done it in a day-and-a-half's long work. So I had presumed, after an cursory examination of the Tapestry's simple forms and limited palette, that this would go even quicker.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Turns out replicating another person's gesture, spindly lines, and erratic color choice, on a mostly two-dimensional image that is just textured enough to catch light like a three-dimensional object...well, it's a different set of challenges. So four days later, still not altogether satisfied with the result, I'm feeling a little humbled. Here's how it went, anyway:

Some of the illustrations for the book I'm working on are more engaging than others. The simplest ones tend to get the most enthusiastic reception, and I understand why; they're immediately comprehensible, and they often involve animals, which are just sort of instinctively interesting to look at (this is why the average family frequents public zoos more often than it attends public statistical demonstrations--although the Albuquerque-wide "Multiple Regression Analysis and You" festivals have been making rapid gains in popularity in recent years). I'm guessing that has a lot to do with subconsciously identifying and being drawn to eyes/faces, which is why mascots are so often used to grab attention and deliver messages. Maybe I should have developed D'nae (the plucky little DNA strand who teaches every protein that they play a vital part!) at the beginning of this project.

But for now the ones I'm proudest of--the ones that take the most work and thought--often aren't given much attention when someone rifles through the pages. Their role is to introduce concepts, so it's a spoonful-of-sugar-helping-the-medicine-go-down thing. I think the reason I like them so much is that the original sources they're based on are so opaque--and making the information more accessible feeds my need to improve things. Here's a copied page from a genetics text that was recently passed on to me by the author I'm working with (I don't know whose work it's originally from, I'm afraid, or I'd attribute it).

While this illustration isn't terrible, I dislike it for a number of reasons. It's clumsy in its organization and cluttered in its content. So the first thing I did was sketch ideas for restructuring the information--something that would make the categories a bit easier to grasp at a glance:

That seemed clear enough, I thought, and used it to built a digital draft, assembling bones of the information to come, establishing a color scheme and spacing.

(Pretty nice supercoil there, right? Oh yeeeeeah)

Then I sweated over (well, neck-strained over, anyway) getting the important bits right, bright, and polished.

So there! It's not going to win any Most Cuddly contests, but I think it's clearer than the original. And prettier, if I do say so myself. And I do!

(Though not in meetings.)

Illustrations, chugging along. I've been revamping some of the earlier pieces I did some months ago, and am so doing am really pleased by the clear improvement I can see with my photoshop skills--what I was capable of then, what I am capable of now. I'm a fair bit away from establishing the perfect balance of painting and digital painting, but I'm pleased to be able to see growth.














A very successful meeting today with both the book's author and the paleontologist she's consulting for accuracy. He was complimentary of the work, but was also able to point out some corrections that needed to be made (mostly in charts and such)--in other words, the perfect balance of useful!

The end of the project is coming up fast. I have two of the 35 left to finish, and after that, only corrections at the suggestions of reviewers and editors.

SCIENCE! The textbook is getting into the more complicated of its arenas, and I'm getting a crash course in all that stuff I should remember about the building blocks of the living universe. Fortunately, there's a wealth of illustrations of these processes out there, so I had a good time rummaging through them and finding what works well, or horribly, about each.

The trick seems to be expressing the ideas clearly as possible without being misleading about their complexities, which simply can't all be delved into in this book, due to limitations of time and space.

So! This is what I ended up with for the structure of DNA.

Looking at it now, I'm thinking a background color may be in order....but that can wait, for the moment. I did have fun playing with backgrounds a bit while I finished putting the pea pods together.

Christmas! We made chicken and dumplings, drank a little Asti Spumante, gave the dogs baths, and all that other stuff that generally only happens once a year. In addition, I painted many, many horses.

Here's the fruit of my most recent labors: illustrations showing the predicted results of the crossing of two palominos:

(cute, no?)

...And the potential offspring of a chestnut and a cremello (both of which are the products of palomino parentage).

Illustrations. Here's some preliminary work for a model of Mendel's experiments with pea plants, which will illustrate the distribution of dominant and recessive traits in the species he studied.

Having painted these four, I've scanned them into photoshop, and can now manipulate them to look like a few different ones, adjusting the colors and flipping them. That won't fool anyone who's looking for it, but at a glance it will take away the cut-and-paste feeling that so often happens on charts like this.

Soon I'll add grid lines, arrows, and text; then three tiers of background color to more clearly identify the three different generations. Then fact-checking.

After it's complete, I'll follow up with a series of four illustrations showing the projected progeny for four horse pairs with a variety of coat colors. Nothing better than having an excuse to paint lots of baby horses! But for now, peas it is.

Illustration time. Check out the Pleistocene, newly completed!

It still needs a few more trees, and a pack of wolves, back on the knoll between the mammoth and bison. Then on to some science-y stuff like genetic probability and DNA and amino acids and the like.

In my satisfied exhaustion I pulled out the camera late last night and snapped this in our darkened living room: documentation of the second spread, an imagined scene from some point in the Miocene.

I'll pull it out again and look at it critically in a couple of weeks. Once I've finished all the illustrations, I'll have a clearer head to assess which improvements are necessary, and which problems resolve themselves once I've separated myself from their creation.

This is what as known as "getting back on that horse," I think. Or is it back in the saddle? Anyway, I guess the main point is that it's equine-related. Having neglected everything but my thesis for the last couple of months, I'm shifting focus back to fulfilling my illustration contract for Evolution of the Horse.

The last push will be a big one, as it involves three spreads containing scenes from the early Eocene, the Miocene, and the Pleistocene. I've been glomming the hundreds of illustrations that Zdenek Burian created for Life Before Man, and I'm not deluding myself that I compete in his sphere--but I'm making peace with what I can do given my limited time frame and limited knowledge.

So here's my first epoch. Still wants a bit of work to harmonize everything in the landscape, maybe some more subtleties in coats/skins of the larger animals--especially some higher contrast on that big guy by the water, the Coryphodon. My biggest concern is that the proportion of the animals to one another reads roughly accurately. Sort of tough, as they're densely compressed into a single landscape.

Looking forward to getting the tape off, seeing it clean and finished.

Another day of illustration work (around and about my day job, which until teaching starts next week, is painting Christmas ornaments).

Here's one, done a few weeks ago, depicting examples of ungulates with even and odd numbers of toes. The horse and rhino are odd-numbered (one and three, respectively); the llama and pig are even-numbered (two and four).

This weekend (around watching the Perseids) I've continued to work on the set of illustrations for the Evolution of the Horse textbook I've been working on over the last month. The textbook series' demographic is 12-14 year-olds, so the author often has images that are standard in most academic writing about the topic, but wants them a little brighter and (ideally) more dynamic. Here's an example of the type of image she wanted recreated:

And here's the version I ended up with:

Some of the pieces are information-heavy (maps of fossil discoveries, charts of body mass increase across millenia), but my favorites, unsurprisingly, are the ones that deal directly with depicting the bodies of the animals.