Art Monday: peek at my Jane Goodall portrait

This drawing is actually larger than my scanner. (Click to enlarge) It's part of the series I am tentatively calling Lights. You can see a photo of J. Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins at this post.

I am trying to tie-in a source of light on each scientist's head, and some sort of double helix shape in the backgrounds. For my second drawing project at York University.

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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 ***

Welcome "Blogs of Note" readers!

Yesterday, I had the thrill of coming home and finding out The Flying Trilobite had been listed as one of Google Blogger's, Blogs of Note.

Welcome to the new readers!

I love introducing new people to my Art in Awe of Science, and would like to know more about you. So consider this an open thread to say, introduce yourself, and link back to your own blog. Please feel free to be interesting and not spammy. :-)

A quick intro to who I am: My name is Glendon, and I'm a classically trained oil painter living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I paint mainly using a mixture of traditional and digital techniques, and I love science, atheism and the wonder of imagination. All three of which can go hand-in-hand! Mainly, I paint subjects inspired by our pale blue dot's rich evolutionary history. And the occasional comic book character.

My art has been cited on numerous blogs about the intersection between art & science, and I attended ScienceOnline'09 to moderate a discussion session on the subject, and I will be attending the 2010 conference to expand on it, co-hosting with the inimitable Felice Frankel.

You can read more about me at my bio page.

I also sell some reproductions of my art in my online shop, including t-shirts. Last year, I launched a calendar, which I have re-named Collection 1 and is now updated for 2010. I will have a Collection 2 out in the next few weeks.

Some of my top posts in my opinion are:
-The making of Darwin Took Steps.
-My thoughts on Inspiration & Drugs.
-Because of the amount of searches for it, I posted about Flying & Asthma.
-If you follow the label "process", you will find many more "making of" type of posts about how I create my work.
-I'm a member of Art Evolved, a fantastic collection of paleo-artists. Check us out!
-I've created a number of custom blog banners:

I believe in charities, and two I recommend very highly are:
The Beagle Project
Foundation Beyond Belief
Take a look, and see if the promotion of science, wonder and the advancement of people inspires you.

Thanks again for visiting The Flying Trilobite!

-Glendon
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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 ***

Quick glance: Venter & Dawkins

A quick glance at two of the (hopefully) six portraits I'm doing for my drawing class at York U.

Left, J. Craig Venter, right, Richard Dawkins. Click-y to enlarge-y.
I'm thinking about calling the series, "Lights". I'm planning next to do Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Eugenie Scott and mmmmaaaybe, Carl Sagan.

Quality is somewhat sacrificed for time, but I suppose they're passable.
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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: Science Checkmate

A couple of days ago, I used Photoshop to edit my painting, Science Chess Accommodating Religion. I want to try changing the relationships of the pieces, and making the image more graphic and cartoony so it could appear on a t-shirt. I am thinking about captioning it "Science Checkmate".

Michael Barton, of The Dispersal of Darwin suggested placing the pieces around the fallen bishop. Great Idea, Michael! It changes the way they appear utterly. Finally, I will need to punch up the whites and reds so it can be printed on fabric with more vibrant and clear colour.
I have to say, I'm working with Photoshop Elements these days, a program that came in in the box with my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. I didn't use it on my old computer, but Elements (so far) appears to be superior to me old Photoshop CS. The selection brush is one of the coolest things ever. I thought it was just for tracing and it took a moment after selecting the outline of the Mendel piece to realize it simply expands the selection field to wherever you've brushed! It was a magic moment.


I'll post the final cartoony image and t-shirt another day, once it's in the repro shop.

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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 ***

Anniversary 6

Six years ago this evening, I married Michelle.(I drew this for our invitation, based on John Atkinson Grimshaw's Iris, my favourite painting, which we saw on our second date.)Victoria College, University of Toronto.


She is my favourite person.

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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 ***

Science Checkmate

Using my oil painting Science Accommodating Religion, I've been noodling around with the image.

This might look good on a t-shirt if I punch up the colours to a less painterly, more graphic cartoony look. Hmm. I saved the image with all the pieces in separate layers so I can move them around and resize them easily. Now that I look at it, perhaps the pieces should not be so evenly spaced.

Looking for opinions: how should I tweak it for a shirt in my repro shop?

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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: practicing with Brushes

The Brushes app on my iPod Touch always makes for an interesting diversion in those odd moments - standing and waiting for a friend, a short streetcar ride.

I've been practicing a bit to get more detail. The control over opacity and the colour picker are terrific. My one grumble with this elegant little program is in using small brushes.


(Click to enlarge - probably to bigger than it appears when I'm working on it!)

There are three brushes, smooth to coarse, and a slider to alter the width. The problem is the slider is real touchy at the narrow end. So duplicating a "pencil" sized line becomes a real challenge.

I've been working on this face off and on, trying to play with wrinkles and textures, and generally get a handle on the program. A lot of the proportions are off, (and the purplish glowing eyes are possibly a bit creepy) but it's for the sake of the exercise.

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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 ***

New Going Pro post discussing copyright

For all the amateur-eyeing-professional artists out there, I've put up a new post about copyright over at Art Evolved. Part of my Going Pro series.

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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 ***

First "Going Pro" post at Art Evolved

The last couple of years online I feel I've learned a lot -especially about how much more I have to learn- regarding the business side of freelancing. So I've begun a series of posts to generate discussion and share resources with the rest of the Art Evolved bloggers and readership.

I'm calling the series, Going Pro....


Pretty soon, we'll look at issues surrounding copyright.

If you're not familiar with Art Evolved, its a group paleo-art blog that's growing and growing! Every two months we publish a free-for-all gallery for blog members and readers alike. Next up are the sauropods, the first week of November.

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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 ***