Sometime today my Darwin portrait, Darwin Took Steps, will be posted on The Eloquent Atheist! I will update this post and add the painting to my deviantArt gallery later on. I'm pretty excited to have another piece featured in The Eloquent Atheist.
If you haven't stopped in to that online 'zine, you really should. Make sure it's during a time of day you have to spend just idly reading. Great poems, essays and prose to be found. And the occasional piece of art from freethinkers.
Also today, sometime before noon eastern standard, I will post a "making of" post of Darwin Took Steps. Why not see the evolution of a painting today as well? Okay, okay, it's really development, not evolution. I suppose it's good ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny when it comes to art. I'd start out in crayon, move my way through finger paint, awkward comic book figures with too many muscles, out of proportion life drawings, then to sunken oil paintings, and finally Darwin would just pop out.
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Other Darwin Day happenings:
-Go to the offical organiser's site, Darwin Day!
-A nice round-up (kid friendly, too!) at The Free Range Academy!
-Can't miss the wild and woolly folks at The Beagle Project!
-Pharyngula should be talking about evo-devo sometime today.
-Carl Buell's 2006 Darwin Day illustration is a classic: check it out on Olduvai George's Flickr site!
-There's always stuff going on at Richard Dawkins' site. Check out the cards!
I'm sure a lot of the science blogs in my blogroll will be involved. Please feel free to post a link to your own art/writing/Darwin Day happening on my comment thread. I'll update this with the link to The Eloquent Atheist as it comes up.
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Saturday, 9 February 2008
more than scribbles in the margin?
The Flying Trilobite's 1st Blog Award!
The headmistress of The Free Range Academy has bestowed upon The Flying Trilobite's humble cephalon the E for Excellent Blog Award!
I solemnly swear to grant the E for Excellent Blog Award to:
1. Fresh Brainz - For a blog about neuroscience and rationality to be so eclectic and wild and just plain bonkers, I need to grant this award to where my brain goes for a freakout.
2. Life Before Death - Reflective, sensible, insightful, witty and recently, frequent photos of the bees the author keeps.
3. Traumador the Tyrannosaur - written from the point of view of a Canadian ex-patriot living in New Zealand. Oh and he's an extra-small tyrannosaur. There needs to be a movie with videogame tie-in. And action figures.
4. Retrospectacle - I know Shelley Batts' blog is ending/spawning soon. What is it about neuroscience students that makes them so well-informed about weird things that really matter? Needs another award.
5. Sentient Developments - serious, thoughtful, and about nothing less than humanity's future, this blog is strange and vital.
6. Jesse Graham's Art - J. Graham's art is playful and tiptoes up behind you with the kind of drawings you wish you'd thought of. A talent unfettered by narrative.
7. Metamagician & the Hellfire Club - smart, concise, and the type of writing that needs no pictures. For freethinkers, science-types and Russell Blackford's groupies.
8. Olduvai George - The art of Carl Buell, no longer being updated regularly. I don't care; this blog is the gateway I rush through there to see what new stuff materializing in Carl's Flickr account. Real extinct artiodactyls make the concept of a unicorn look just lazy.
9. Zooillogix - captions so funny it actually makes me snort espresso out my nose. And it's about zoology.
10. Page 3.14 - I never know what I'm going to find here. And I really look forward to finding it. SEED magazine's editors know how to interview and uncover the things you didn't know you wanted to know.
Please enjoy the awards! Mine will sit on my mantle, next to my trilobite fossils and favourite paint brush I had dipped in gold. (It doesn't spread the paint as well as it once did, but -man alive!- it can keep it's tip pointy...)
The headmistress of The Free Range Academy has bestowed upon The Flying Trilobite's humble cephalon the E for Excellent Blog Award!
This is a pay-it-forward meme of sorts, as well as an award. In accepting it, it needs to also be granted to ten blogs chosen by the recipient. This is tough: I'm adding to my blogroll all the time.
I solemnly swear to grant the E for Excellent Blog Award to:
1. Fresh Brainz - For a blog about neuroscience and rationality to be so eclectic and wild and just plain bonkers, I need to grant this award to where my brain goes for a freakout.
2. Life Before Death - Reflective, sensible, insightful, witty and recently, frequent photos of the bees the author keeps.
3. Traumador the Tyrannosaur - written from the point of view of a Canadian ex-patriot living in New Zealand. Oh and he's an extra-small tyrannosaur. There needs to be a movie with videogame tie-in. And action figures.
4. Retrospectacle - I know Shelley Batts' blog is ending/spawning soon. What is it about neuroscience students that makes them so well-informed about weird things that really matter? Needs another award.
5. Sentient Developments - serious, thoughtful, and about nothing less than humanity's future, this blog is strange and vital.
6. Jesse Graham's Art - J. Graham's art is playful and tiptoes up behind you with the kind of drawings you wish you'd thought of. A talent unfettered by narrative.
7. Metamagician & the Hellfire Club - smart, concise, and the type of writing that needs no pictures. For freethinkers, science-types and Russell Blackford's groupies.
8. Olduvai George - The art of Carl Buell, no longer being updated regularly. I don't care; this blog is the gateway I rush through there to see what new stuff materializing in Carl's Flickr account. Real extinct artiodactyls make the concept of a unicorn look just lazy.
9. Zooillogix - captions so funny it actually makes me snort espresso out my nose. And it's about zoology.
10. Page 3.14 - I never know what I'm going to find here. And I really look forward to finding it. SEED magazine's editors know how to interview and uncover the things you didn't know you wanted to know.
Please enjoy the awards! Mine will sit on my mantle, next to my trilobite fossils and favourite paint brush I had dipped in gold. (It doesn't spread the paint as well as it once did, but -man alive!- it can keep it's tip pointy...)
Sunday, 3 February 2008
Retrospectacle: "making of" retrospective
Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle and Steve Higgins of Omnibrain will be closing up their blogs, and merging into one metabrainy blog. Both are neuroscience students, and are part of the ScienceBlog network.
Readers of The Flying Trilobite may recall that I was elated (frantically excited, honoured, scraping & bowing) that Shelley had asked me to design a new blog banner for her last year. It is still featured in rotation with a banner by Carl Buell, scientific illustrator par excellence.
Sometime this weekend, Steve and Shelley will be announcing the new blog title, which they threw open to their many readers in the form of a contest. I contacted Shelley when I read the news, and I may be once again contributing a banner. Here's hoping! Carl Buell has offered again as well, and Steve has some quirky banners of his own on Omnibrain.
So, since this may be the last weekend of Retrospectacle, I thought I would post here the process I went through to come up with the banner. This was already featured as a post on Shelley's blog, but I thought I would import it here, for my old & new readers. Hey, it's almost like an insight into my heavily-caffeinated brain. From September 24, 2007.
--
Step 1. Thought about wing, an ear, and started with the Valkyrie type image. Thought about how cool it would be if Shelley was leading a gang with multiple-species, parrot-wing helmeted scientist-warriors.
Step 2. Drew a wing out in water-soluble pencil crayons, fudged the wing colours to bring in the red of an African Grey's tail. Worried about purist owners of African greys slamming the heresy.
Step 3. Copied a photo of Shelley from her blog, heightened the contrast, and clipped the sketch from step 2 onto it. Shelley mentioned making it dark, (my favourite) and I threw a black background on it. Also hand-drew a 2 minute version with blue around it too embarrassing to see the light of day.
Step 4. This is where I stay up late, drinking coffee, listening to fast gothy electronic music like Jakalope. Used my favorite tools, 0.3mm lead pencil on vellum-finish bristol. Used Shelley's face for the Valkyrie, since Retrospectacle is personal. I am really happy with how this drawing turned out. I like the Valkyrie-type idea. They were strong mythical female warriors in an age dominated by men. The wings also suggest Nike or Athena to me, for Victory & Wisdom. Scanned image in, printed it out onto canvas-paper so I can paint it without harming the original drawing.
Step 5. After painting on top of a couple of versions, I had trouble with the pale face and shadowing away from the ear. I decide to see what it would look like if I invert the whole thing. Showed it to good friends who will criticise me if I am on the wrong track. More coffee & fast electronic beats.
Step 6. Painted the ear & wing in oils, scanned it, tried a few concepts. This symmetrical one seemed too busy and impersonal. Played with various levels of cropping to see if the whole face was more important than the feather details.
Step 7. The final product. I picked this one since the face is up close which seems more intimate. Added effects using Photoshop to give it depth and draw the eye from the image on the left to the title on the right. Used font named 'Kartika' and put a spiral for the 'O' to reference the cochlea. Finished all the coffee in the house.
--
I wish Shelley and Steve all the best on their new adventure in brainy blogging. 'Can't wait for the new title! I've got some ideas already.
Readers of The Flying Trilobite may recall that I was elated (frantically excited, honoured, scraping & bowing) that Shelley had asked me to design a new blog banner for her last year. It is still featured in rotation with a banner by Carl Buell, scientific illustrator par excellence.
Sometime this weekend, Steve and Shelley will be announcing the new blog title, which they threw open to their many readers in the form of a contest. I contacted Shelley when I read the news, and I may be once again contributing a banner. Here's hoping! Carl Buell has offered again as well, and Steve has some quirky banners of his own on Omnibrain.
So, since this may be the last weekend of Retrospectacle, I thought I would post here the process I went through to come up with the banner. This was already featured as a post on Shelley's blog, but I thought I would import it here, for my old & new readers. Hey, it's almost like an insight into my heavily-caffeinated brain. From September 24, 2007.
--
Step 1. Thought about wing, an ear, and started with the Valkyrie type image. Thought about how cool it would be if Shelley was leading a gang with multiple-species, parrot-wing helmeted scientist-warriors.
Step 2. Drew a wing out in water-soluble pencil crayons, fudged the wing colours to bring in the red of an African Grey's tail. Worried about purist owners of African greys slamming the heresy.
Step 3. Copied a photo of Shelley from her blog, heightened the contrast, and clipped the sketch from step 2 onto it. Shelley mentioned making it dark, (my favourite) and I threw a black background on it. Also hand-drew a 2 minute version with blue around it too embarrassing to see the light of day.
Step 4. This is where I stay up late, drinking coffee, listening to fast gothy electronic music like Jakalope. Used my favorite tools, 0.3mm lead pencil on vellum-finish bristol. Used Shelley's face for the Valkyrie, since Retrospectacle is personal. I am really happy with how this drawing turned out. I like the Valkyrie-type idea. They were strong mythical female warriors in an age dominated by men. The wings also suggest Nike or Athena to me, for Victory & Wisdom. Scanned image in, printed it out onto canvas-paper so I can paint it without harming the original drawing.
Step 5. After painting on top of a couple of versions, I had trouble with the pale face and shadowing away from the ear. I decide to see what it would look like if I invert the whole thing. Showed it to good friends who will criticise me if I am on the wrong track. More coffee & fast electronic beats.
Step 6. Painted the ear & wing in oils, scanned it, tried a few concepts. This symmetrical one seemed too busy and impersonal. Played with various levels of cropping to see if the whole face was more important than the feather details.
Step 7. The final product. I picked this one since the face is up close which seems more intimate. Added effects using Photoshop to give it depth and draw the eye from the image on the left to the title on the right. Used font named 'Kartika' and put a spiral for the 'O' to reference the cochlea. Finished all the coffee in the house.
--
I wish Shelley and Steve all the best on their new adventure in brainy blogging. 'Can't wait for the new title! I've got some ideas already.
Saturday, 26 January 2008
My Trilobite Ring
A few years ago, while shopping in The Museum Company at the mall, my fiancee-at-the-time and I came across some trilobite jewellery. It was so emblematic of my tastes, I was desperate for a ring. It is an elrathia kingii inset in steel, and if you flip it over and look at the inside of the ring, the fossil's belly, still retaining ancient dirty matrix, is visible. Elrathia are known for having 13 pleurae down their bodies (little spiny lines off to each side).
Michelle bought it for me, and in some ways, it felt a little like an engagement ring to me. Now we are married, and I covet this ring. It is...precious...to me.
I seldom wear it now. It is 550 million years old, and it is eroding at my touch. I put it on at special occasions, or sometimes just as a treat and inner distraction. You see, I have a lot of associations and mental investments swirling in the memetic wind around this ring.
Michelle bought it for me, and in some ways, it felt a little like an engagement ring to me. Now we are married, and I covet this ring. It is...precious...to me.
I seldom wear it now. It is 550 million years old, and it is eroding at my touch. I put it on at special occasions, or sometimes just as a treat and inner distraction. You see, I have a lot of associations and mental investments swirling in the memetic wind around this ring.
My wife gave it to me, and whenever I look at it, I think of how crazy I am about her. A flood of memories washes over me, and I begin to think of memories still to come. This fossil, with its tiny compound calcium carbonate eyes has been around 550 million years. And now it's existence is congruous with my own, and with the experiences my wife and I share.
When this little arthropod was alive, humans were an inconceivably faint glint in perhaps some pikaia's eyes. As a fossil, will it last another 550 million years? Will one day, I be a fossil next to it, unlikely as that is?
I wear it on my right hand, the hand I create my artwork with. How is that for post-modern progression: the eons-old fossil, sitting on the hand of of the primate, while he draws and paints pictures of the fossil, which the primate hopes will give him a type of longevity, of immortality through art.
This ring has inspired my art, and is the basis for my business card, for the tattoo I plan to get this spring. It will likely inspire much more. This little trilobite is not just an emblem. It once was a tiny organism, perhaps wandering away from it's hatch-mates, poking its feelers through the sand, over a rock, feeding, respiring, evading detection by predators. I am living my life, wondering at it living it's life.
All this to me speaks to what it is to be human. As I said in my first post, I can sit here and marvel at a being long dead, but not forgotten. I can understand some things about it. And I can be inspired by it.
It is steeped in so many thoughts, it gathers and concentrates them. This is what fossils and artistry, - what science and art! - can give us. Meaning wrapped-in tightly and woven together. A memetic structure, chaotic and incomplete and growing inside my brain.
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
New Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil found!
...and it's on my blog banner. 
It seems to be a member of the Ogygopsidae family. Hmm. Wings appear to be mammalian. Someone call Richard Fortey, or Sam Gon III.
It seems to be a member of the Ogygopsidae family. Hmm. Wings appear to be mammalian. Someone call Richard Fortey, or Sam Gon III.
Tuesday, 8 January 2008
Looking Ahead: Glimpses of Artwork for 2008
As promised in my last post, here are some closely cropped details and sketches of art pieces I've been working on. This will see the flickering pixels of day some time in 2008. The first one is complete, and will make a splashy debut within the week.
No links - these aren't online anywhere else yet. The images may be a little washed-out and blurry since I won't subject them to a healthy Photoshop exfoliating until they are finished gestating.
One of these will be The Flying Trilobite's new banner for 2008.
No links - these aren't online anywhere else yet. The images may be a little washed-out and blurry since I won't subject them to a healthy Photoshop exfoliating until they are finished gestating.
One of these will be The Flying Trilobite's new banner for 2008.
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