2008: cake smashing fossils

Looking over my shoulder at the trail of scientifically-induced paint spatters I have left strewn in my wake, I'm gonna share. Here's a glance at handful of The Flying Trilobite's 2008 images.

This year, I've put up 36 artworks, 26 of which were new (the remainder pulled from my pre-online portfolio) and 17 of which were in colour. I began this blog as self-promotion, and I've also dramatically increased my output. The icy sorbet next to the smashed cake is the amazing and fascinating bloggers and commenters I get to interact with.
January 2008: some incorrectly-assembled arthropods clung to the walls of the interwebs. The debut of a new banner.

February: The Charles Darwin portrait no one asked for. It debuted originally on Darwin Day over at the online literary 'zine, The Eloquent Atheist. It later showed up (by my count) on over half a dozen other blogs in English and Spanish, and remains popular in my DeviantArt gallery and Online Reproduction store. Darwin Took Steps will also soon be appearing in print, possibly in more than one venue! I can confirm that it is featured on the front cover of the current issue of Secular Nation.

March: The Flying Trilobite debuted on Facebook, in both the Pages and Blog Networks, keeping me in touch with many readers who I would otherwise be unaware of. I have refrained from sending Facebook fans Zombie attacks and Garden Patch decorations, though I have made Flair.

March was also my first cake smashing anniversary.A new blog banner launched in time for the inaugural post of the Scibling-melded blog, Of Two Minds in March.

April: Began Art Mondays, reviewed Darwin: The Evolution Revolution at the Royal Ontario Museum for the fine folks at The Beagle Project.

May: Wrote Flying & Asthma based on faulty searches that find their way here. The conversation continued with the insightful and thoughtful Zach of When Pigs Fly Returns and Jeff of Blue Collar Scientist.

June: New tattoo.

Hosted The Boneyard and focused on a small portion of the amazing paleo-inspired artwork that finds life online. I promised bunnies this year, and I delivered a creationist bunny on Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle when it was still wet.

July.

August: Lost a blog-friend at the beginning of our friendship. I'm not the only one who misses Jeff Medkeff, The Blue Collar Scientist. He managed to inspire me with the story of his brave last days. Jeff's death shook me for some time, though our comments had been brief.

I wrote about Inspiration and Drugs.
Completed the blog banner for The Meming of Life, the free-wheeling wonderful parenting blog by Dale McGowan.

Launched The Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop through the wonderful Redbubble after some advice from artist-illustrator Heather Ward. Proceeds from the sale of the Darwin Took Steps image reproductions will go to The Beagle Project.

September: My good offline friend, artist Christopher Zenga took his Walking Tedd paintings and drawings online at The Day After.

October: donated some studio time to The Centre for Inquiry - Toronto lecture featuring PZ Myers of Pharyngula. Got to meet and shake hands with PZ, Skatje, Larry Moran, Geoff Isaac, Amanda Peet, Monado, Gary Roberts, Katie Kish and Justin Trottier and many others. Great weekend.

November: Began to plan for attending and moderating at ScienceOnline'09. I'm pretty freakin' excited. Ahem.

December: Launched my most successful reproduction, the 2009 calendar, and added a Darwin t-shirt to my store. Jointly posted holiday trilobites with Marek of eTrilobite. Emails regarding publication began to float my way...

A special thanks to all those who made it such a great year. I know I'm missing many, but here goes anyway: Mo, Eric J, Traumador, Craig, Bond, Leslie, Sean, Chris, Marek, Stephanie, Mike, Dale, Shelley & Steve, Carl, Michael, Heather, Brian, Jeff, Zach, Lim, Kristjan, Betül, Emile, Karen, Eric O, Jeff H, Raptor, Bora, HW & the Captain, my Facebook fans, Atheist Nexus peeps, DeviantArt freaks, Redbubble watchers, my family, my friends, and most of all my wife Michelle who gets to watch me freak out at each paintings' ugly phase.

Merry 2009!

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.
2009 Calendar available now!

Darwin Took Steps featured on Secular Nation magazine cover

Starting the new year with stairs from a venerable mind.

Darwin Took Steps, has been featured on the cover of Secular Nation Magazine, the Jan-Mar 2009 issue!

A big thank you to Editor-in-Chief Tom Melchiorre for asking to reproduce this oil painting of our man Charles and promoting the importance of the theory of evolution by natural selection in this important year. And thanks for the great cover design from this terribly biased illustrator.

The version used on the cover is the one I sometimes think of as "Darwin Took Steps mark I". It's the original photo of the painting (with some Photoshop tweaks) when it was still wet and featured on The Eloquent Atheist for Darwin Day last year.

Remember, you can help support The Beagle Project by purchasing Darwin Took Steps t-shirts, Darwin Day cards, and prints on canvas or archival paper from my online reproduction shop.

I hope to have some more news shortly about Darwin Took Steps appearing on another publication in the near future. This is my first print-and-published work for a magazine, so I'm feelin' proud.

Support Atheist Alliance and pick up a copy of Secular Nation for a Darwin Day whirlwind.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.
2009 Calendar available now!

About Glendon Mellow

Glendon Mellow - The Flying Trilobite - Art in Awe of Science

Links
-glendonmellow.com
-The Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop
-DeviantArt.com Profile + Gallery
-Twitter
-Art Evolved Profile
-Facebook Page
-Facebook Blog Network
-Redbubble Profile
-ImagineFX Gallery
-Atheist Nexus Profile
-LinkedIn
-Nature Network Profile
-FriendFeed

Professional Art + Illustration
Since The Flying Trilobite's inception in March 2007, I have found support and resonance from the science, secular and artist communities online. I continue to be available for freelance art and illustration. My work has been featured on numerous blogs in the past couple of years as examples of the intersection of art and science.

Glendon Mellow: Art in Awe of Science, my professional portfolio can be found here.
The Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop can be found here.

January 2010, I attended ScienceOnline2010 and was involved in two sessions. I led a workshop introducing the versatility of digital tablets and the program Gimp. Also, with session co-leader Felice Frankel, we discussed our topic, Push it 'til it breaks: what are the limitations of visual metaphors?

An interview and 4 illustrations appeared in the new coffee table book, Geology in Art: an unorthodox path from visual arts to music for geologist and trace fossil artist Andrea Baucon for his. You may preview the entire book at the link.

Beginning in the fall of 2009, I began a series entitled Going Pro at the group paleo-art blog Art Evolved. My aim is to discuss with new illustrators some of the lessons I have learned so far in my career.

Published in Fall 2009, my illustration of an Ent from can be seen in issue #48 of Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Literary Society.

The group paleo-art blog to which I belong, Art Evolved, was featured in a two-page spread in the September 2009 issue of EARTH Magazine, the publication of the the American Geological Institute. The issue included my Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil III as one of four illustrations from the Art Evolved members.

The Flying Trilobite was included in an article entitled Blogging Evolution by Adam Goldstein for the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach as an example of "imaginative" blogs about evolution. Other blogs featured on the list od evolution-education included Pharyngula, Why Evolution is True, The Loom, The Beagle Project, and many more excellent blogs.

In May 2009 I completed a blog banner commission for Migrations, a blog about science, society conservation and migration patterns.

Also in May 2009, I took part in SciBarCamp Toronto and moderated a session entitled, "Can art benefit science?"

The popular Darwin Took Steps is now appearing on a book of science philosophy, entitled La Mente di Darwin, ("The Mind of Darwin") by Andrea Parravicini, and published by Negretto Editore of Milan.

In early 2009, my Darwin Took Steps image was seen on the cover of Secular Nation magazine, and I was interviewed in a podcast about it. This image has been quite popular, and was included as part of my contribution to the cover of Open Laboratory 2008, an annual science blogging anthology. I also donate a portion of the sales of t-shirts, cards and prints of the image to The Beagle Project.

In January 2009, I attended Science Online '09 in North Carolina, U.S.A. In the unconference format, I moderated a session about Art & Science, and co-moderated an online-image workshop with artist-biologist Tanja Sova.

In November 2008, I produced a poster for PZ Myers' Toronto lecture, hosted in part by The Center for Inquiry Ontario.

Summer 2008, I completed a blog banner for The Meming of Life , a secular parenting blog.

I was commissioned to produce a new blog banner for the Scienceblog, Of Two Minds , as well as the online ‘zine The Eloquent Atheist . Unreal trilobites with insect or bat wings have been a part of my work for over 12 years now and I have painted some of them on pieces of shale, as in this interview on Page 3.14 with Virginia Hughes .

Artist's Statement
With my drawings and paintings, I seek to increase our metaphorical vocabulary using the discoveries of science, particularly biology and palaeontology. The genius of representational painting, epitomized by the Renaissance masters, the Symbolists and a handful of Surrealists has never had a more apt time for inspiring wonder in humanity than during our modern scientific age.

Why use Odin to portray wisdom when I can paint Darwin?

Why paint flowers when the beauty of the structure and oxygen produced by diatoms is so compelling?

Regard the resilient stony success of the legions of trilobite species waiting in the rocks. Ready to spring forth into our imagination, taking flight in my mind. They are the mischievous goblins underground, pointing the path to the richness of Earth's history. I can stand here, separated by 550 million years and look at this long dead animal and understand some things about it. I can imagine adventures for it. How can I not? It is a responsibility I delight to indulge in. The absurdity of unimaginable time and my eyes and hands crafting an image of a fossil while flying in a plane still makes me laugh.

I have studied Fine Art at York University, majoring in art history, drawing and oil painting. The Symbolist era of fin-de-siecle Europe inspires much of the aesthetic of my work. The urgency of Symbolist artists such as Fernand Khnopff, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, as well as the Surrealist Frida Kahlo, appeals to a dark sense of the world, with fragments of hope. The imagination found in faery artists like Arthur Rackham, and current illustrator Alan Lee are delightful, and shaped much of my early work.



A bit more about me...
I was born under a cabbage leaf in the summer of 1974, covered in stork feathers and placenta. I’m inspired by evolution and biology to create my paintings. I’m particularly fond of Naples Yellow. Delicious looking colour, and not healthy at all.

I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife Michelle and our hermit crab Shiny and school of neon tetras collectively known as Roger. I love to sketch at the Royal Ontario Museum.

In 2008, I also had one of my Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossils tattooed on my arm.

Feedback and commissions keep me going!

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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

Calendar peeky-peep

Here's some more peeks at The Flying Trilobite 2009 Calendar.

March.This is the original Mythical Flying Trilobite Fossil painted on shale. There should be a new one gracing my blog banner early in the New Year.

May.

June.

The calendar is available by clicking on the back-cover image in my sidebar, any of the images above, or by clicking here.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.

Art Monday: business card tweaks

A 3"x2.5" piece of cardstock is supposed to be my standard bearer when introducing people in realspace to my online identity and artwork.

Earlier this month, I began tweaking this important piece of identification. I hope I may ask for some opinions? Things that look great on the computer screen may not look as nice on paper. My favourite has more drawbacks than the others.

a. Classic look.

b. X-ray look.

c. Pop look.

Which is most "me"? Or do I say who cares, which one stands out the most?

The reverse of each of these will simply list the urls for my blog and hub, online gallery, email, and reproduction store. Hmm. Should I add my Facebook page link?

I'm finishing the end of the year indecisive. Decisive will wait for 2009.

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store.
2009 Calendars available now!

Art Monday: Encrinurus

Here is the drawing along with the Tra-la-la-lobe-ite painting presented yesterday.

I just hope Walcott discovers what's in those presents. A big thanks to Marek Eby of eTrilobite for joining me in that epoch-old holiday of trilobites at Krismas/Solstice/Newtonmas/Haeckelmas. It just isn't the same without a glass of cinnamon-topped egg nog, a trilobite racing around underfoot and some lovely art.

If you'd like more trilobite art year 'round, why not pick up The Flying Trilobite 2009 Calendar?



Ahh, the holidays...Merry Krismas, everyone!
-Glendon

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All original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow. The contents of this blog are under a Creative Commons Licence. See sidebar for details. Please visit my blog, gallery and reproduction store. 2009 Calendar now available!