Fossil Fish Sketch

Loosely based on Diplomystus, here's a fossil fish I've been sketching while waiting to pick up my son from daycare.

Fossil Gears

One of the highlights during our road trip from Toronto to Halifax was spending a night at atheist-political-sciencey blogger Lousy Canuck's place. Jason and Jodi were kind enough to put our travelling caravan up for the night and introduce us to the wonder of Portal 2. 

To thank @lousycanuck and @pixelsnake for their hospitality, I repainted one of the paintings on slate from my (now-dismantled) final school project into this new work, Fossil Gears. 

The visit was far too short. We need to meet up again some time! 

Flying Trilobite, left, Lousy Canuck, right.

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Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the Scientific American Blog Network!

The Fish Stands for Surrealism

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
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Lookee here-->  Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the new Scientific American Blog Network!

Contest banner at Science3.0

Mark Hahnel of Science 3.0 asked if he could use one of my dinosaur drawings for a contest banner on their network - I said sure!  My artwork is under a Creative Commons Licence that says it can be freely shared so long as no money is involved, it's not altered and I get credit. In this case it needed to be altered - but Mark asked, and hey, that's what the licence is supposed to encourage. This has been your copyright service announcement for the day.

Here's the Oviraptorosaur skull incorporated into the contest banner.

I drew this handsome fella a couple of years back at the Royal Ontario Museum.

More importantly, check out the contest!  

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Art Monday: Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle

This post originally appeared on the 29th of November, 2008.  

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"...Evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water.


"When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J.B.S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.'



"No such anachronistic fossils have ever been authentically found..." -Richard Dawkins

-p127-128, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006.
Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68000-9.

A scan of my Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle. Oil paint on 9 pieces of shale, 2008. Prints now available.
Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration A): False Rabbit 
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here.

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (configuration B): True Trilobites
available as greeting cards, mounted print, matted print and canvas print. Click here. 


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

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Trilobite Boy - gargoyle progress

Continuing the work I showed in Monday's post, of Trilobite Boy sitting on a rooftop near some gargoyles.

Found a bit of time to start laying down colour.

Below, you can see the colour under the sketch layer with the sketch rendered invisible.  The bits of wings and buildings are on another layer entirely.

Here's the original sketch overlayed on top of the colour, below. 

Once I build up enough colour, I'll erase the sketch.  Although...maybe I'll leave some of the bluish lines on top of Trilobite Boy, or just his wings, to give it a ghostly appearance.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
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New! Art Evolved aggregate feed

By clicking the shiny, shiny button above, you can follow all the blogs in the Art Evolved group!

There's like, 20 of us in the network at present, making paleo-themed art that ranges from scientific illustration to surreal to silly.

Check out the blogs!

• http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/
• http://blogevolved.blogspot.com
• http://coherentlight.blogspot.com/
• http://seancraven.blogspot.com/search/label/paleo%20art
• http://www.weaponofmassimagination.blogspot.com/
• http://prehistoric-insanity.blogspot.com/
• http://cawbox.blogspot.com/search/label/dinosaur
• http://drawnintime.blogspot.com/
• http://paleoking.blogspot.com/
• http://traumador.blogspot.com/
• http://www.phillyrawrblog.blogspot.com/
• http://blacknick-sculpture.blogspot.com/
• http://www.drip.de/
• http://whenpigsfly-returns.blogspot.com/search/label/Paleontology
• http://art-by-angie.blogspot.com/
• http://subhumanfreak.blogspot.com/
• http://mambobob-raptorsnest.blogspot.com/
• http://www.etrilobite.com/
• http://petersaurus.blogspot.com/
• http://glendonmellow.blogspot.com

I've also made a feed widget available to our members, you can see it in my left sidebar (I may move things around though).
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence. 


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Art Monday: dinosaur skull sketches

A few past dinosaur skull sketches, mostly made at the Royal Ontario Museum. All done with .3mm or 2mm technical pencil in my trusty Moleskine sketchbooks.

Pachycephalosaurus. Original post here.

Parasaurolophus. Original post here.


Oviraptorosaur. Original post here.

Gryposaurus. Original post here.

The contours and shadows are endlessly fascinating to draw. I gotta get a new ROM membership.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Life as a Trilobite

One of my personal favourite paintings. Click to enlarge. Below, detail views.

Life as a Trilobite Oil on canvas, early 2000's.
Detail view also available in my print shop as a greeting card or in a variety of fine art print formats. Originally debuted on The Flying Trilobite here. Tricky to photograph, as I poured stand oil over the surface giving it a mottled, organic look that reflects light strangely.

I'm working on some new images with a variation of this character called "Flying Trilobite Boy" - I'm adding wings.



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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Medium overriding the message?

When presenting the final project of my undergrad here on The Flying Trilobite, (see the process here: one, two, three, four and five) some excellent points have been raised in the comments of the last post.

My Art Evolved peeps Craig and Peter have been discussing whether or not unconventional mediums (like a wooden cube with busted slate tiles painted and hanging from wire) end up muddying the message more than conventional, easier to read forms.

Here are a couple of more photos, different from the the last post in that they show off the individual paintings more:

Click to enlarge.

This picture was taken on a weird angle. Sorry.

It was an interesting experience for me to have some of my artwork turn off someone for being post-modern and medium-focused. Typically, I am a painter in love with creating representational, realistic paintings.

As Craig pointed out, the medium is the message. We see here not only a 3D series of paintings hanging in a cube, we see them through the lens of a camera and displayed on a computer screen. It's very removed from say, Darwin Took Steps, a much more 2D picture which translates better through scanning and being online.

How much can the presentation enhance or interfere? Would video of a 3D object present better online, panning, zooming and with soft techno music in the background? Would it be clearer to scan individual pieces and present them as head-on photos?

Is this presentation in the immortal words of Mo the bartender, "po-mo; postmodern; weird for the sake of weird" or is something more getting across?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Next time on The Flying Trilobite: my interpretive dance fossil project!

Fine Art Open House at York U

Last week, we had the Visual Art Open House at York U.  I had a couple of pieces there. 

I took some pictures of other fascinating paintings and sculptures, but didn't know who (or sometimes where) the actual artists were to put them on here with their permissions; everyone was having a good time socializing and showing guests around.  Michelle and our nephew came with me.  Here's a few pics. 

My Invasive Species project. 

ScienceOnline2010: anthropomorphizing is fun to say

(You can read more for our session Pushing it 'til it breaks: what are the limits of visual metaphors? by clicking here or on the scio10art label below, or by checking the wiki.)

Visual metaphors not only help describe difficult concepts, but they can also allow you to play with them. One of my favourite ways to do that, is by anthropomorphizing them, giving objects personality and purpose, either through their relationship to one another, or by injecting them with human qualities they don't actually possess.

Consider the following images I've made.

Darwin Took Steps

Sowing Seeds & Fossils

Science-Chess Accommodating Religion

Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (config a: false rabbit)
Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle (config b: true trilobite)

How does each give a personality to inactive objects?

What are the spatial relationships?

Do you feel the metaphor is decisive about an issue, as in a political cartoon? Is it open ended?

What do you see? What do you imagine happens next?

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Seed Fossil Flax Flower

A detail view of one of the underlying drawings from my project, Sowing Seeds & Fossils.


The text written on drafting film in the image below says,

a. Nutrient- rich shell yields dark oil when pressed.
b. Flowers have ammolite-sheen on stalks, esp. at base.
c. Pleasing to my eye. I hope transfer works onto pumice.
d. Observed to crawl blindly up the sides of buildings to eavestroughs.

You can see the project and all it's layers here.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Sowing seeds and fossils

This is a multi-media drawing project about York University's landscape. Once, southern Ontario was underwater. Many marine fossils can be found here, such as ammonites. More recently, the land was used for farming. Here, I am showing flax, a favourite of mine due to its use in oil painting.

This is Sowing seeds and fossils.
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It is constructed out of beechwood panels,
a piece of shale, various pumice mediums,
with acrylic matte medium transfers of the drawings,
chalk pastel, graphite and charcoal,
mylar and india ink,
.3mm mechanical pencil with HB lead on vellum-finish bristol,
with notes from scientific documents,
and notes from my sketchbook.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Art Monday: Migrations banner concepts

This is Part 1, Concepts.
Go to Part 2, Final Workflow.
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Collaboration can lead to wonderful places. I've done a few blog banners for other bloggers before, (Retrospectacle, Of Two Minds, The Meming of Life) and I think it can be incredibly beautiful for a serious blogger to hire an artist to do some custom work. Look at Carel Brest Van Kempen's exemplary A Blog Around the Clock banner, or Jessica Palmer's own Bioephemera banner. This is serious art conveying information on the diverse moods and interests of the blogger. Perhaps a review of blog banners is in order some day.

Dan Rhoads is a molecular biologist and avid naturalist who moved from America to the island of Cyprus. His blog Migrations ranges in topics such as bird-watching, conservation, science in society and whatever else catches his keen eye. After a rocky patch of non-connecting emails ("What do you mean I am having trouble sending instantaneous messages halfway around the world?! Preposterous!" I spluttered), and with some help from Mike Haubrich, Dan and I got started.

Initial ideas that were tossed into the salad bowl of my brain:
-Fibonacci sequence. Archaeopteryx. Cyprus. Human migration out of Africa. Bird Migration, v-formations. Darwin's finches.
-Dan's personal migration to Cyprus.
-Looked up cellular migration, realized it's poorly understood.
-Read about Dictyostelium discodeum, an amoeba useful in studying cellular migration, has a slug-form it adopts when moving. I like saying "dicty-disco" out loud.

Starting with these ideas, here are some of the images developed in the rough conceptual stage.

Archaeopteryx on a slab in the shape of Cyprus with a shadow of a modern bird, pencil:A spiral emanating from archaeopteryx's eye, birds following the path, human footprints, dictystelium amoebae tracing a path. Cool tones, digital painting:Same spiral, archaeopteryx. Warm tones in oil paint:Wedge-shaped concept, flight of birds in center, Cyprus on right, amoebae moving from left. Pencil:
Wedge concept simplified. Dan suggested amoebae in positions of Mediterranean islands, but I kept a wedge shape. Oil paint:

There were a few other pencils in similar vein. I worried the concepts were missing a human connection for the blog-reader.

On my walk to work one day, I stopped in the park and scribbled out an idea. Take it right back to the human traveller. I touched up the pencils with india ink, scanned it and did a slapdash colouring job with digital painting in Photoshop. Included the image at the last minute in an email to Dan:

Bingo.

I'll conclude this "Making of the Migrations banner" in part 2 later this week! In the meantime, make sure to view the final in its proper home.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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Art Monday: Eremotherium & Glyptodon

Burning the candle at both ends. Happy and artistically busy. Please enjoy precious fossil eremotherium skull and fossil glyptodon skull while I scamper back into my cave-studio and continue cackling gleefully while I toil. These skulls are...precious...to me.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ###

Art Monday: inspiration interruption

Inspiration can strike at unlikely times. Usually, once I feel bogged down and frustrated while waiting for the oil layers to become tacky and the details to swim up and wow my eye, I am struck by competing compositions that fight my attention.

This time I'm going with it. Yeah, sure I have a sketchbook-load of ideas waiting to jump out this year, but I need to explore this Darwin and South American mammal fossil thing for a bit. My wife was great, just said go for it. Sure I spent ten hours drawing, painting and liveblogging; but I'm going where the Muse leads me.

So here's is where I left Charles since Darwin Day, discovering our friend the glyptodon.

It's not complete, and I'm still working on it. Remind me to fix the wrist. And the sky remains a mystery for now.

But I'm not about to abandon two of the other ideas that have been rattling around in my brain, waiting for release through my micro-paintbrushes.

Here's the beginning of one. I was hoping to sketch megatherium, but it turns out the Royal Ontario Museum doesn't have one on display. So, after a hasty 20 minutes between work ending and the R.O.M. closing, I sketched the distinguished skull on the left, an eremotherium.

You may notice I was looking up at it. On the right is the glyptodon again, a new drawing.

There will be more to this image, including Charles. To picture him, think of this quote: "He should be quite well-protected. If he survived the freezing process, that is."

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ##
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Merry Darwin Evening!

Liveblogging a new painting has taught me some things:

-It is possible to tire from the taste of amaretto-flavoured coffee (!)
-Don't start until you have a kick-ass drawing already complete, scans & paintable prints ready
-Stop reading other Darwin Day posts when trying to paint
-Twitter is all aboot being an amazing tool
-There is no such thing as a small enough brush for an 8.5x11" painting
-As prodigious and exemplary as his work was, even Mr. Darwin must have slept sometimes.

Perhaps I should have simply tinted the drawing in Photoshop and called it a night?

I will soldier on over the weekend, and post a follow-up for Art Monday at the latest. Thanks to everyone for support today and all the entertaining and informative things I never knew about our Charlie.

This ain't done.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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Darwin Day Liveblog 5: deep in the ugly

At this phase, I feel like I can't stand the painting. If I wasn't clocking myself, I'd probably move on to a different piece. Charles is feeling it too: he's aged 20 years since the pencil sketch somehow.

Starting to work on the fossil skull. Maybe flipping on my iPod will help me pull it outta this nosedive by Liveblog 6.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
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## 2009 Calendar available for a limited time

Darwin Day Liveblog 3: set-up

The painting is underway. I think I'm loving the Gold Ochre Transparent Hue on this one. And plenty of Naples Yellow, naturally.

This is the super-heroic Art S. Buck model in the pose, to try and get the lighting down from an indirect, overhead source in my studio, below.

Here's my set-up, this time on the dining room table. Should be moving along faster now.




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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow under Creative Commons Licence.
Flying Trilobite Gallery ### Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ##
# 2009 Calendar available for a limited time