Art Monday: Fossil Boy, Diatom Girl

Our final project for my Drawing & Narrative class was more or less open. I decided to continue exploring ammonite fossils, hands, and some diatoms.

For a long time, I've used diatoms along with images of my wife, Michelle. Diatoms are beautiful algae that create complicated geometric structures from silica, and look like beautiful glass ornaments. They help create oxygen, which is a nice thing for an asthmatic like me to associate with my wife in a metaphorical life-sustaining way. The fossils are kind of a proxy for me. Part of the suggested outline for the assignment included making a book, and images of family.

Three of the most difficult things to draw are the face, hands, and feet. (Foreshortening is a whole other problem.) I love drawing hands, so I looked at this as a challenge. I decided I would add some torn paper elements as well. While working on my rough sketches, our professor suggested including some elements with the Fibonacci sequence, and looking up artists Mario Merz. I've done some sketches using Fibonacci numbers before, when I was working on Dan Rhoads' Migrations blog banner. I tried to use it as a compositional device.

Almost in its entirety, (a snippet is lopped off from the edges), here are the drawings from the series Fossil Boy, Diatom Girl.


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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 ***

2010 Calendar - atheism months?

Here's a look at two of the more controversial months in The Flying Trilobite 2010 Calendar. Perhaps not controversial to some of the regular readers of TFT. Atheism can still be a charged subject in a crowded room.

May: Science-Chess Accommodating Religion is a painting I did this year inspired by the writing of many atheist bloggers, from Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson, to Mike Haubrich and Jason Thibeault. The whole thing actually started out as a tweet of mine, which Mike at Tangled Up In Blue Guy liked. You can read about that here.

October: October has an image called Education: Science Vs. Religion that was created as a poster for a Centre for Inquiry lecture in Toronto by PZ Myers of Pharyngula, in Octtober 2008. It had some interesting disagreements about symbolism at Pharyngula in the comments. You can see a bit more about it from me here, a making of here, and shots of the final poster here.

Both of my calendar collections, dated for 2010, can be found in my RedBubble reproduction shop.

Collection 1: Collection 2:


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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 ***

Interview at Extreme Biology

An interview with yours truly, conducted by Melina of the Extreme Biology blog has gone up. Extreme Biology is a high school biology class blog run by Miss Baker. who teaches in the North Eastern U.S. The students will also be attending the upcoming Science Online 2010 in January, and I hope to shake hands with the interviewer!
I dunno though. Sometimes I wonder if listening to an artist is like listening to one of those Eighties hair-metal bands talk about their music. Hopefully I made more sense.
(Thanks Melina and Miss Baker!)
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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 ***

The “that’s right people, I’m an artist, but I do science-y art and it’s cool” badge.

Aww, thanks Jason! (see below)

ArtRage news and nephew

The last few months I've been exploring a fantastic digital painting program called ArtRage 2.5. It only cost about $30 Canadian, works beautifully with a tablet, and has a fascinating array of tools. Including glitter.

Unlike many other programs, the interface couldn't be simpler. Most of the things you need are located on the two quarter-wheels in the corners.You can choose the paper or canvas surface you want, and manipulate the thinners in the oils. There's an instant-dry feature. An array of palette knives.


Great news! ArtRage 3 is about to launch for download on December 14th! The new version is apparently going to have tons of new features, including watercolours. And the price of the version I'm using is going down to about $20, according to the announcement.


My 8-year old nephew loves ArtRage too, mainly for making skateboard deck designs.

As you can see, he's much, much braver than I am with the program. I still have an oil painter's inherent caution and planning, but the Neph? He just goes for it! Amazing.
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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: Darwin Display

From -nieh-'s Flickr photostream.

A mighty tip of a ten-gallon hat to Michael Barton of Dispersal of Darwin for sending me the link. I believe this must be the Casa de las Ciencias display I mentioned recently.

Sweet. I like the Darwin-Moth painting. Anyone know who painted that one? I'm proud to have Darwin Took Steps in such good company.

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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 ***

2010 Calendar Available now!

Holiday ideas from Flying Trilobite

This is a whole new collection of bio-, atheistic and paleo-artwork I've put together as a calendar for 2010. I'm really proud of this one, and it has a few image variants not previously available. I've included a peek at a few images below, and you can click through the entire calendar at my RedBubble reproduction gallery.

June

JulyBack Cover

I loved the print quality of the 2009 calendar by RedBubble. They accept payment in many currencies, Canadian, U.S., Australian, U.K., and Euros. If you missed it, you can also purchase last year's calendar, with the dates revised for 2010!

It's a great a relatively inexpensive way to own a lot of Flying Trilobite artwork. Impress and weird out your friends, co-workers and labmates.

Both calendar collections can easily be found here.

And I've added a new tee! This t-shirt was suggested by one of my blog readers, Alison from the land of Aus. It features my popular Haldane's Precambrian Puzzle. Here's a close-up of the t-shirt graphic: It's available in 4 styles of sweatshop-free shirt, and in multiple colours.

And there is still time to order the popular Tra-la-la-la-lobite cards with delivery before Christmas day!
(Hmm. Next year perhaps ornaments?)

Happy Holidays and Merry Krismas!
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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 ***