Tag: illustration

Industrious Illustrating #53 – Life Drawing 5

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week’s update is a little brief, since I’m just recapping the trip I took to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles over winter break. When I was there I took the opportunity to draw some of the fossil skeletons on display to better understand the construction of animal bodies, as I hadn’t seen some of these skeletons in real life before and I want to make more creature/scientific illustrations in the future.

Something interesting about my trip there was that there was a glass windowed viewing area to look at scientists at work cleaning fossils recovered from the “tar” pits (which are actually filled with liquid asphalt!), and there were a few informational plaques and displays sitting on the windowsill ranging from excavated bugs and microshells to stuffed animals of the animals most commonly found in La Brea. There was also a scientific illustrator on staff (who I assume drew the lovely drawings on some of the plaques) who was actively working on a scientific illustration on their iPad when I was visiting. I especially enjoyed the puppet of the now-deceased mountain lion P-35, as I’d just read about his story in the excellent book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet”.

All in all, my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits left me feeling more inspired and motivated than before. While I doubt I’ll pursue scientific illustration as a full-time career, I still want to explore different subject matter I find interesting as much as I can so that my work will be versatile and never grow stale or predictable. And of course, there’s no need to travel far from home to do so — even back in Ann Arbor there’s several resources such as the Natural History Museum, the Leslie Science & Nature Center, and the Creature Conservancy that all have skeletons or live animals on display to see and understand in real life.
That’s all for this week! What would you guys like to see me discuss next week? Let me know!

LOG_026_KERNEL_BARNACLES

Traveler Leave a comment

KHEPRI-1B

CATEGORY [ XENOBIOLOGY ]

ARTICLE ARCHIVED FROM [ MARIAH BERGGREN ]

ARTICLE NOTES:

[ The kernel barnacle, so named for its resemblance to Earth barnacles and a vague similarity to the shape and size of sunflower kernels, are an order of false barnacles that are native to the deep oceans of Khepri-1b. Similar to Earth barnacles, they are typically sessile as adults and are predominantly filter feeders, though motile juveniles have been observed to actively prey on tiny organisms. Unlike Earth barnacles, they are only found attached to rocks and debris around deep-sea hydrothermal vents on Khepri-1b. Their shells are composed of chitin, iron compounds, and silica, the latter of which creates an opalescent effect under shifting lights.]

Industrious Illustrating #52 – Experimentation

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! It’s now 2024, which opens up a lot of new possibilities and directions for the rest of the year. That means I want to highlight a few drawings I’ve made recently that are more experimental or different from what I usually draw.

This was more of a graphic design-esque drawing I made for some zippered coin purses that I ordered from a supplier during a sale depicting a plastic file, two different types of plastic nippers, and two hobby markers that would all be common tools for building model kits. I wanted to go for something simple yet bold, as my usual style focuses a lot on details and elaborate painting.

This, meanwhile, is a quick digital doodle of the cell towers disguised as palm trees that I saw all around the Los Angeles and Orange County areas when I was visiting family there over winter break. I wanted to convey the feeling of driving home after a long day and realizing something is slightly off with one of the freakishly tall palm trees lining the freeway. I also wanted to free myself from needing every drawing to be highly polished, so I set myself a time limit on this one and stopped drawing once the 20 minutes was up.

That’s all for this week, but I want to wrap things up with a quick question. What ways have you personally experimented with your artwork recently — and if not, how will you experiment with it in the future? I’d love to hear about it!

Industrious Illustrating #51 – 2023 in Review

Robin Leave a comment

Happy holidays! I’ve been alternating between seeing my family, vacationing, and making art during break. Something I wanted to share with you guys before the end of the year is my 2023 art summary:

Template made by @Taxkha on Twitter/X

I tried to pick from a variety of art styles/subjects I drew this year to represent how I’ve progressed as an artist, as well as how my thoughts have continued over the course of the year across each month. It’s pretty obvious that I’ve been drawing a lot of mecha lately, so I’ll likely set aside some time to draw humans and furries next year more often.

Some notes: I had the hardest time picking out a single piece in July, August, October, and December to represent my art progress, as I had so many good pieces to pick from for those months. Meanwhile, February, March, September, and November were relatively easy to pick from as I hadn’t finished as many pieces. Not coincidentally, those were also mostly the months where I was starting new semesters of college and therefore had less spare time/energy to spend on my artwork. And in November’s case, I had two cons back to back that month and also had to deal with semester project deadlines creeping closer ahead of the end of the semester.

In terms of what I want to do next year art-wise, I do want to keep giving my follower/customer/client base what they want — which is largely fanart and acrylic charms — and make great sales online and at conventions, but I also want to do more original art and make my portfolio more solid to apply for well-paying art or design gigs. There’s only so much time I have in the day and year to make both of these aims happen, of course, but I am enrolled in a scientific illustration class next semester to make the second aim more achievable. I’ll likely be posting assignments from that class next semester as I try to strike a balance in this column between art business topics and talking about my art practice itself.

That’s all for this week, and I wish all of you a happy and restful holiday season!

Mixed on Campus #16 – Alice Conner

Alice Conner Leave a comment

Name: Alice Conner
Mix: Japanese & White-American
Major & Year: Industrial Engineering; Junior

Q: How has being mixed affected your campus experience?

A: My racial identity and the racial/ethnic identities of other mixed people are often scrutinized by others. People choose to accept or not accept my racial identity based on when it is convenient for them. Constant scrutiny on my appearance and the validity of my experiences is alienating, exhausting, and psychologically distressing. How you look is not a choice. Before joining the student organization Mixed@Michigan, I did not have the vocabulary to defend myself and other mixed people. People did not listen to me until I educated myself, even if all I learned were the “proper” words to explain what I already knew was true. Mixed people should be heard even without statistics and well-spoken words.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about the mixed experience?

A: I believe a lot of the prejudice towards mixed people is a result of ignorance, which is why it’s so important for mixed people to be able to speak about their own struggles and experiences. I want people to understand that the mixed experience is a real lived experience and not just an interesting debate topic. I’m tired of hearing arguments on whether or not a mixed person is allowed to identify with or represent a specific racial identity based on the percentages of their racial makeup and opinions on what the person looks like. How a mixed person is perceived by others will depend on the mixed person, the person perceiving them, AND on the context of the situation. In the end, monoracial people do not have authority on how a mixed person chooses to identify.

+1: Mixed people are not buffers between different racial categories. People should not be measured and judged based on their perceived proximity to whiteness. Oppression is often discussed in binary terms (a person either experiences it or they don’t), but reality is not so easily categorized. Mixed people are used to this idea– they are good at tolerating contradiction and ambiguity.

Q: What is your proudest moment?

A: I’m very proud of this project. What I wanted to do with Mixed on Campus was provide other mixed people with the opportunity to speak up about things they might not have been able to before. I’m very grateful for all the responses I’ve received and the opportunity to use my platform to provide a voice to the mixed community at this university. Mixed@Michigan is a club in which we are bonded not through a specific racial or ethnic identity but because we have all experienced what it means to not fit into the monoracial paradigm of racial purity that society expects. We are able to support each other and provide a safe space free of judgement and questioning. There is so much diversity in experiences within the mixed identity and I wanted to be able to show that by providing other mixed people with the chance to tell their story.

Mixed on Campus was inspired by the Humans of New York project. The purpose of Mixed on Campus is to give a voice to this university’s mixed community and shed light on its members. Being mixed means to be multiracial, multiethnic, and/or a transnational adoptee. Through Mixed on Campus, mixed students have the opportunity to have their portrait drawn and share their experiences!

OTM #42: Something a Little Different!

katelynski Leave a comment

Hi all, hope your preparations for finals are going well (if you’re a student like myself, that is)! I just wrapped up my final project for my Minor in Writing’s Gateway course (Writing 220), and I wanted to share some of the illustrations I had the opportunity to make for it. Our projects are semester-long “experiments” all centered around one “origin piece,” something we wrote when we were younger that we want to explore the ideas of. My origin piece was an old article I wrote about a trend in which people tried to watch the most disturbing media possible — fascinating, I know. In relation to this, I wanted to reconcile with my younger self, who, in a frenzy of wanting to feel “older” did a similar thing, getting really into online horror. The above illustration bridges the gap between present Me and younger Me’s mindsets, showing us sitting together and drawing “My Little Pony” characters in awe of each other.

I also got to make these cool introductory illustrations, paying homage to the old Internet and displaying both versions of myself trapped in MS Paint tabs. I’m really happy with these ones! Thanks to arts, ink., I really feel like I’ve nailed how I like to draw myself. Below I’ll share some other illustrations I’m happy with too! In my project’s story, I depicted my young self exploring a haunted house, hence the spooky stuff. Thanks for looking/reading, and good luck wrapping up the semester! I sure need it, haha.