Science Art - Tumblr Posts
artist: cosmodernism on instagram // vimeo
Potential application for Mastigoproctus giganteus, the giant vinegaroon.
Vinegaroons are a lesser known order of arachnids, the Thelyponida. They don’t have venom but they can spray acetic acid, the main component of vinegar! Though these funny little critters may look intimidating to some, they’re harmless unless you’re a small prey insect (or you can’t stand the smell of pickles).
Funeral for a friend: decay, extinction, and saying goodbye
This paper-mache 1:1 scale allosaurus bust holds a special place in my heart, he’s one of the first sculptures I ever made. Apologies for the level of scientific accuracy here—it was 2013, I was young and naive.
The planets have aligned in an unfortunate way, and it’s time for me to send him off to the great beyond. I’ve fretted for a long time about how to do this.
I decided to let him slip away in a slow decay, rather than a blaze of glory. I’ll be documenting my buddy here slowly melt back into the earth. He’s made of paper, cardboard, and flour paste; I’ll gather up his polymer clay teeth as they shake loose during his final rest in my parents’ backyard. Big thank you to my folks for allowing me to do this weird thing.
For as long as it takes I’ll document the process of my allosaurus friend disappearing. I’ve been thinking a lot about loss and goodbyes in the past few years. Decay too. The permanence of it all makes my stomach twist, even for a silly dinosaur sculpture. Once it’s gone it can’t come back
So cool!!!
Eukaryotic cell gang!! We love women in STEM.
The organelles of the cells have been translated into human anatomy, so the nucleus is the brain, the vacuole function as the lungs, and the mitochondria is the heart since it’s the… you already know, I don’t have to say it ;)
Cloud Types
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Hunter Cole - Artist and Geneticist
Cole grows the bacteria in a liquid culture, and then uses the culture as her paint, applying it to a gelatinous augur in a petri dish, as if the augur were a canvas. When applied, the culture is clear, but over a 24 hour period it slowly begins to glow, becoming more visible. For the two weeks following the culture’s application, as the bacteria grows and dies, the drawing changes.
Tell me about your life as an artistic scientist
To be honest, it’s a bit confusing…
I try to do science and art comes out,
(I was supposed to be focusing on looking at a bunch of different tissue samples, not getting carried away drawing the slides.)
And when I try to do art, science comes out.
(I was just doing some animal sketches for class, but anatomy is just so pretty.)
Then, when I tried to combine the two, the reference was lost on my audience.
I was aiming to anthropomorphize the experiment done recently which electronically linked the brains of two lab rats. (I drew this as part of an in-class exercise. I drew the rats in the first phase, swapped comics with a classmate and they drew in the background.)
So, as I said; it’s a bit confusing, but honestly, I don’t mind; it makes it more interesting.
For those days when you need more Alchemy with your Chemistry..
The artist also does glass molecule jewelry.. which is amazing.
- mashafalkov on Etsy
Using chemistry to make otherworldly art Artist Iori Tomita explores the natural art of the skeletal system by exploiting clever chemistry tricks.
What are some common mistakes paleoartists tend to make in modern reconstructions? I wanna know what to avoid when drawing dinos.
Not to intimidate you out of paleoartor anything, but there are so many. It’snot necessarily the artists’ fault; new discoveries about dinosaurs are madeevery day, and many pieces of paleoart are quickly rendered obsolete by theinexorable march of science. However, somecommon mistakes are totally the artists’ fault, and that’s the kind I’m goingto cover here.
Here are the three big ones that always bother me the most.
“Shrink wrapping”: The practice of reconstructing dinosaur as little more than skeletons wrapped in skin, creating terrifying dino-mummies that - while quite nicely showing off the artist’s grasp of skeletal anatomy - do not accurately depict what the animals would have looked like in life. (Compare that shrink-wrapped Apatosaurus to this shrink-wrapped depiction of a cow, if you’re not convinced of how silly this is.)
Problematic depictions of feathers. Whenever a dinosaur is discovered with feathers, paleoartists will oftentimes reconstruct it with those feathers and those feathers alone, not bothering to speculate as to what the animal might really have looked like fully-feathered, while creating pitiful-looking animals that look like partially plucked chickens. Still other times, artist fully feather the animal, but keep the face scaly and bare, just so we can all remember that dinosaurs were reptiles (and not birds, you guys).
“Monsterizing.” The reconstruction of Velociraptor linked above is pretty infamous. In reality, feathered dinosaurs were probably not scuzzy movie monsters; they probably looked like this, and were potentially even more birdlike than this reconstruction. Another example of this is Microraptor, the infamous “four-winged dinosaur”, commonly depicted zooming past the viewer with all four limbs spread like some kind of prehistoric dragon monster, when in reality it was probably just a bird.
What do all these mistakes have in common? They depict the artist’s preconceptions of dinosaurs, rather than creative speculations on how these animals actually would have lived. A lot of dinosaur enthusiasts are in it for the wrong reasons; they see dinosaurs as rampaging creatures of myth, rather than what they were - animals. They depict dinosaurs as roaring behemoths and scuzzy-feathered killing machines, rather than biologically sound, real, once-living creatures that were as beautiful and graceful as any modern animal.
How can you avoid this? Do your research, and use your imagination. Keep up-to-date on the latest theories about dinosaur musculature and soft tissue, and develop your own well-informed opinions to inform your paleoart. At the same time, compare dinosaurs to animal living today. Not just reptiles and birds; compare them to large mammals that fill formerly dinosaurian ecological niches. What features do modern animals have that dinosaurs might have as well, but that we rarely see represented in art, due to lack of direct fossil evidence? What adaptations might dinosaurs have evolved, to excel in the same way as modern animals?
Here’s some good modern paleoartists to get you some potential inspiration:
John Conway
C.M. Kosemen
Julius T. Csotonyi
Luis V. Rey
Here’s some sketchbook pages from the last few months I really like!