Trying Something Bold

Pretty soon I plan to have a new website portfolio and probably even an integrated blog. I may be leaving my 7 year home here on Blogspot pretty soon.

Above is a logo, badge icon thingee I'm trying out.

The two contenders for my future website are Squarespace and newcomer with mystery future-features Artstation. More about all of this soon. 
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

Lochlan Mellow

Dear Everyone-We-Know,

The evolutionary legacy of an upright posture,
a clever mind
opposable thumbs,
acute visual sense,
a talent for pattern-finding
and a love of metaphor
Has been passed down through
an exploded star,
a planet,
life,
to chordates,
to mammals,
to apes,
to humans,
to Michelle and Glendon,
and finally, on January 20th 2014 at 9:20pm to Lochlan Charles Follett Mellow.

                             

Lochlan Mellow has entered the universe's history at 7 lb 12 oz , to the
delight of his family and has all the potential in the world to be a
tool-user, a thinker, a metaphor-maker, an artist, a scientist, a poet, and most likely a source of surprise. 

He joins his excited, caring brother <a href="http://glendonmellow.blogspot.ca/2010/12/calvin-mellow.html">Calvin</a>. Calvin has taught us that the growing mind of a baby is a series of mysteries unfolding and being solved. 

Thanks to everyone online and off, for their words of support and enthusiasm. Most of all, our deepest thanks to the nurses, doctors, specialists and students at Mount Sinai Hospital here in Toronto. Both of our sons arrived in the same delivery room (Go room 7!) to talented, kind, enthusiastic faces ready to greet him and show Michelle every courtesy. You all rock. 

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Quick self portrait

                    

                     

A quick self portrait. Sketch Club on iPad. 

Apparently that's not my good side. Hopefully this will get easier with a stylus instead of my finger. 

I like this part, though: 

                    

Knowledge Pupates [wip]

Lately I need a warm-up to get back into my commissions, so I've been spending a few minutes here and there with this old drawing, re-painting it with ArtRage. I think the pencils are about 15 years old.

It might appear on Symbiartic in its final form. 

The ebook I have planned will likely be this style, or something close to it. Pieces like this help me think about it.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
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Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the Scientific American Blog Network!

S I X

One. 

Two. 

Three. 

Four. 

Five. 

And now, 

Six. 

The Flying Trilobite blog is six years old today. 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

If I Had Google Glass

I am Canadian, not American, but...  #ifihadglass  I would record the collision of science and art through my painting, through research and through making something new. Sharing my perspective from my perspective on our greatest ability, the ability to make things that never before existed. #ifihadglass  I would share creation.

Google Glass looks cool with a hoodie. I own hoodies. 

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Google's rules ask for a 50 word or less answer to what you would do if you had Google Glass. Above is mine.

I cannot win since I am Canadian. But I haven't been this inspired by technology for my art since I saw a painting done on an iPad for the first time. I still haven't been able to budget for an iPad (I hope to change that in the next 6 months) but now...

I don't know exactly how to describe it. With Google Glass, I picture gathering my materials, snapshots, calling up past sketches from my blog before my eyes as needed, and embarking on a new painting. Snippets of video of brush on canvas, of Wacom pen on graphic tablet. 

My new book idea on a Guide to Flying Trilobites, a send-up on scientific inquiry, plus a document of the creation behind it. A book about the blind spots in science, with my own blind spots available for the audience to see and experience as viewers while I create. 


Holy monkey, I need Google Glass. Without it, I'm still here blogging. You create with what you have. 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

Creative Depression And How I Got Rid of It

When I die one day, my biggest creative regret will likely be all the artwork I didn't have a chance to finish. Headlines marketed at artists and illustrators like "How to Increase Your Creativity" and "Get Your Creative Juices Flowing" never make sense to me.

Ideas aren't the problem. Time to execute them to my satisfaction is. 

Not every idea makes it past the sketch phase. 

So it may seem strange when I say that looking back, I was in a creative depression for much of last year. I was almost locked-up, I could barely act. Everything seemed too difficult: opening the research files, choosing digital or paper sketching, creating process templates, setting up the easel, dealing with my dismantled studio - it was all too much.

I think I know why, now.

I quit my full-time, 10-year, well-paying job managing an art store the day after I found out my wife was pregnant back in 2010. One friend put it, that he, "nods approvingly at the madness of it".  The final few months of my wife's pregnancy had me working from home, getting a steady stream of small revenue but exciting science-art projects. When Calvin was born, it was great, all three of us together. 

I completed this commission, Tylosaurus Reef around the time of my son being born. 

It was the best time of my life (being a dad, being freelance, blogging for freakin' Scientific American is a dream come true) but barely being able to keep up financially was hurting us. Michelle and I have weathered tough times before - we've been married for 9 years - but it was just us. The weight of responsibility for my son to have what he needs was all-encompassing. The cafe job felt professionally like dues I've already paid as a younger man, but ya do what ya gotta do. 

When Michelle went back to teaching, this was the state of things. I worked those 4 part-time jobs while being a full-time stay-at-home dad. Being a freelancing dad was a process I never finished learning how to do.

I painted this small oil on my first day of full-time freelancing. "Freelance Leap". I never did figure out how to fly all the way to those freelancing fairgrounds in the distance. 

The depression really set in for me last fall after my son started daycare. It was the right time for him to go: he loved it almost immediately, running around, learning like an exuberant, friendly and hyper little sponge. 

The new expense of daycare and the empty house/studio brought it all home for me: 

• With the publishing market being where it is, 
• With scientific funding being so small, 
• With science-art as a field barely crawling on the periphery of cultural awareness, 
• With my history growing up with one parent struggling to keep my sisters and I going,
• With my experience going from job-to-job in a steady stream since I was 14 years old, 
• With my amazing wife and amazing son being here in my life, 

I realized something.

I am not cut out for full-time freelancing.

I sent out resumes to a very small number of studios around Toronto that do work I respect and might be good for my fine art/science/social media/management background, and you know what? One of 'em hired me, and it's fantastic. 

My energy is back, I'm excited to go to work (the team there is brilliant, welcoming and fun), and I'm excited to get up at 5 a.m. to blog or sketch again. And we have groceries. 

The fallout is, there are a few people who have commissioned me I owe apologies to for being later than I ever expected. Three of those projects are still in the works and I hope I make them kick-ass and worth the patience that's been given to me.

I lifted the creative depression by starting to become part of a team doing work I believe in, and by bringing my share into the household. Never underestimate the impact that 

• supportive people, 
• new influences and 
• livable income 

can have on your creativity. 

Okay, so it's not all perfect. For example: my face. 

Art is no longer a grind, and in 2013, I think it will be an adventure again. 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

Field Guide to the Jewel Beetles (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) of Northeastern North America

Cover photo of Buprestis rufipes by Ted MacRae

Buprestis striata field guide page showing colour variations.

Sample key to genera page. All characters used in the key are illustrated with either high magnification photographs or simple illustrations.

Trachys generic page from Field Guide to Jewel Beetles featuring original artwork by scientific illustrator/artist Glendon Mellow.

(*All above image captions by Morgan Jackson.) 
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Last summer, I had Beetle Week here on The Flying Trilobite, to show a series of Ontario jewel beetle paintings I was commissioned to illustrate by entomologist and insect photographer Morgan Jackson, blogger at Biodiversity in Focus. 

The book is now available - including limited copies for FREE, and its a beauty!

I'm so thrilled my illustrations get to share the same pages as photos from Ted McCrae, Morgan Jackson, and many others.

My thanks to Morgan and his co-authors, Stephen M Paiero, Adam Jewiss-Gaines, Troy Kimoto, Bruce D Gill, and Stephen A Marshall.

For another look at the book, and details on getting a copy, check out Morgan's announcement post at Biodiversity in Focus. Make sure to read how this book came about, and learn about the changing beetle landscape.

You can also find merchy-merch on sale in my online store  with the illustrations I created - greeting cards, framed prints, iPhone cases, tees, 2013 calendar and more.

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

Successful Start for My New Portfolio!

Hey hey! I'm excited. 48 hours in, my domain URL not fully migrated yet, and already I've had over 1200 views on my new site. Thanks everyone! 

Finally got fed-up enough with the lack of statistics and support from DeviantArt about their Portfolio service -I really think they've abandoned developing it- so I decided to hunt around and give Blogger's Dynamic Views another try.

I've complained about my problems with DeviantArt Portfolios before, and played with Dynamic Views before.

I decided to go with the Flipcard view to start, and then hunted around to see what other artist-bloggers may have done to tweak the service.

I found a terrific tutorial by fantasy art illustrator Dan Dos Santos on the stellar Muddy Colors blog that solved about 90% of my desired tweaks.

Then, I remembered a great blog for css tweaks to Dynamic Views I had found months ago when messing around, Southern Speakers.

The changes and tweaks were quick and easy, just a couple of hours. Uploading the art and adding links took a while longer. The great thing is, unlike DeviantArt Portfolios, I can have links to my online store, and buttons for tweets and +1 and Likes right below the art.

Note the links to blog posts, my online store, and buttons to +1, tweet or Like. Niftiness!

There seems to be a delay with my glendonmellow.com migrating to URL to mask the site - but clicking on www.glendonmellow.com seems to work fine for most people.

If you'd like to see the old site for comparisons' sake, it's still there. I really admire the set-up DeviantArt Portfolios had going, but it wasn't flexible and the lack of statistics really bothered me.

Thanks for checking out my new home!


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

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

Bay of Fundy

Vacation with my family.

On Vacation

On vacation, driving to Halifax. Stopped in Montreal for poutine and then spent the night in River de Loup.

Beetle Week Day 5: The Exhibit

Welcome to Day 5 of Beetle Week here on The Flying Trilobite!

Earlier this year I was commissioned by entomologist and insect photographer Morgan Jackson of Biodiversity in Focus to contribute to a soon-to-be-published, honest-to-gosh dead-tree book about jewel beetles here in Ontario, Canada. The result? My first series of scientific illustrations, instead of the off-kilter, surreal science paintings I'm known for. 

Today: The Exhibit
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Time to have a look at all of the final versions of the beetles. And a hearty thank you to Morgan Jackson for asking me to take on this project and being so supportive during the process!

Agrilaxia © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Mastogenius © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Paragrilus © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Spectralia © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Texania © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Trachys © Glendon Mellow - Prints available

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Xenorhipis © Glendon Mellow - Prints available 

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There are also many other variations of these images available as mounted and framed prints, posters, and even an iPhone case in my online store. Stickers coming soon!

Thanks for crawling along with Beetle Week!
Day 1: The Challenge of Scientific Illustration
Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro
Day 3: Being a Freelancing Dad
Day 4: Animated Painting of Trachys
Day 5: The Exhibit  
 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop


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

Beetle Week Day 3: Being a Freelancing Dad

Welcome to Day 3 of Beetle Week!

Earlier this year I was commissioned by entomologist and insect photographer Morgan Jackson of Biodiversity in Focus to contribute to a soon-to-be-published, honest-to-gosh, dead-tree book about jewel beetles in Ontario, Canada. The result? My first series of scientific illustrations, instead of the off-kilter, surreal science paintings I'm known for. 

Today: Being a Freelancing Dad
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Let's kick this off with another beetle illustration, since much of this post will be about being a working parent. Here's Spectralia gracilpes:

Spectralia, painted in ArtRage Studio Pro. © Glendon Mellow

Since last December when my wife Michelle returned to teaching, my primary job has been to be a full-time dad. At the same time, in no particular order, I do freelance science illustration, not-yet-monetized science-art consultation, sell the occasional print, do social media work for a major retailer, write a blog for Scientific American and work at a cafe.

 This isn't meant to be a whine from a sleepless parent.  Our son Calvin, 18 months old today, is actually doing pretty good right now, usually sleeping through the night or waking up once around 4 am. He's teething, has almost all of his chompers, but his eyeteeth are taking forever. I suspect he has some sort of huge sabretooth-tiger teeth coming in judging from the pain.

When Morgan Jackson commissioned me about this series of jewel beetles, I had hoped to be faster than I was. I'm fortunate that he and his team were patient and had a long timeline. When I used to work full-time as an art store manager, I'd get up at 5 and work at art or blogging for a couple of hours. That proved impossible over some winter months when Calvin really didn't sleep much (he'd be up from say, 1 am to 5 am nightly). Setting an alarm clock was a waste of time.

And over the past several months of being a freelancing-artist dad, I've learned some things I'd like to share. 

• Keep in contact with other dads and moms in the same freelancing boat to retain your sanity. Mainly, I did this through Twitter. And I'd like to send a shout out to Chris Zenga, Eric Orchard, Kalliopi Monoyios, Russell Dickerson, Marc Scheff and Nathaniel Gold who were all there for me with advice and support at odd hours. Go buy all their prints, comics, books and hire them for work. They know how to keep it together.

• Be thankful for your supportive spouse. Michelle really believes in my work, even when times are tough. Be thankful for big contracts.
  
  
• Working digitally is sooooo much easier than working traditionally.  Digitally, you don't have to wash oil off your hands every time you need to take something out of their hands or pick them up.
  
  
• Once your child enters the toddler stage, consider turning your desk around so it's not facing the wall, but facing the room. Then you can see what they're up to when you're stealing a couple of minutes to work.
   
• Never leave your files open and graphic tablet out once they know how to climb a chair.
  
  

  

  Calvin,about 14 months, working on his art table next to my  workstation.

  
  
  
  
• Put an art table next to your workstation. This has worked out well. It's all about mimicry and ain't nuthin' wrong with your kid learning to use a crayon or marker at a young age.
  
  
• Get used to doing things in little bits. No more sitting down for an hour with headphones on listening to rap or metal full of swearing. It's 2 minutes while they're engaged with a snack or enraptured by kicking a ball around the room. Expect to join them to kick that ball.
  
  
• The kid is more fun, more infectious with their sense of fun, than any work you might enjoy. That's my experience anyway. So I felt a lot of guilt when I'd play with my son, watching another self-imposed deadline dissolve like sugar in water.
  
  

  

  Get outside as much as you can. It's good to stretch your legs when you work freelance. 

  
  
  
• Do something that makes money, immediate money. Don't be too proud. You owe it to your family, especially your spouse, not add to the aggregate stress more than you have to. While I've been a full-time dad, I've also gotten a part-time job at a cafe, because money became too tight and this was a way to get a small but regular injection of money into the household.
  
  
• Don't forget to stop and recognize what you're achieving. This is where one friend (thank you Eric!) really hammered it home for me. Between working at the cafe, making freelance art, selling prints, writing for Scientific American, and doing some paid social media work for a retailer, I estimate I've been bringing in about half my old full-time job's salary per month. While being a full-time dad. Maybe it's not always enough to keep us comfortable, but I still need to be proud of that.
• If you get an evening or a whole day to yourself, get some fucking work done. Don't play video games. Don't browse Netflix. Just get started, then make coffee and keep working.
  
  

  

  The rough little sketch I used for the Spectralia painting near the top. Looks like a squashed banana peel. 

  
  
• Before we had Calvin and when I still was working at a full-time job, I'd get up around 5 am and blog or make art. That way, my day would start off doing what I love to do and then I'd go off to work in good cheer. I'm still striving to get back to that schedule as a dad, and friends tell me it gets easier as the kids get older. 

• Every day when I get up, all groggy and I'm tempted to surf around online with my phone, I ask myself: "do I want to be a content-creator or content-consumer?" It's cheesy, but that phrase rings in my head louder than an alarm clock. 

Already in the time that has passed since I finished tweaking and uploading publishable files for Morgan Jackson, the stress of getting the job done while raising a sleepless vampire child is fading, and I'm left with a happy, healthy active kid who has a dad proud of artwork he'll be able to one day share with his son.

Who knows?  Maybe one day we'll find one of these beetles when we're out camping!

Those are my little pearls of wisdom. Any other freelancer parents have any more?

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Beetle Week continues tomorrow!

Day 1: The Challenge of Scientific Illustration
Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro
Day 3: Being a Freelancing Dad
Day 4: Animated Painting of TrachysDay 5: The Exhibit

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print ShopFind me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the Scientific American Blog Network!

Beetle Week Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro

Welcome to Day 2 of Beetle Week!

Earlier this year I was commissioned by entomologist and insect photographer Morgan Jackson of Biodiversity in Focus to contribute to a soon-to-be-published, honest-to-gosh dead-tree book about jewel beetles in Ontario. The result? My first series of scientific illustrations, instead of the off-kilter, surreal science paintings I'm known for. 

Today: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro

Technical specs: 

• Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet
• ArtRage Studio Pro
• Photoshop Elements 6

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When tackling a new illustration subject for the first time, I like to begin with mechanical pencil and bristol paper. They're my comfort zone. After that though, I have decisions to make. In my undergraduate degree, I worked mainly in oil paint. Since then, I sometimes find it more useful to paint digitally, especially for a project like these beetles. Adjustments and corrections to ensure scientific accuracy are much easier with digital media than with traditional paints.

I've tried a number of digital painting programs, and by far my favourite is ArtRage. If you're not familiar, it's a digital painting program with versions available for PC, Mac, iPad and the iPhone. Each one is relatively affordable (under $100 for the PC version, compared to several hundred for Photoshop).

The main attraction for me with this program has always been the interface. Instead of drop-down menus, ArtRage includes all the important tools right on the screen in two quarter-circles in the corners:

Screenshot showing the interface, from my original test of some of ArtRage Studio Pro's tools. Click to enlarge. 

On the left, all your tools: oil and watercolour brushes, inking pens, pencils, erasers and host of other tools from technical to goofy. On the right, the colours, allowing you to adjust tones and how metallic the paint appears. These two palettes, tools and colours, mean everything to me as a classically-taught painter. I feel just like I'm dipping into my palette or brush box.

In ArtRage you can control the paper or canvas surface (or blackboard, or sandpaper or...) and the digital paint handles differently on each type. The big advance in Studio Pro (also known as ArtRage 3) over the previous 2.5 version is, in my opinion, the amazingly realistic watercolours.

I planned to use watercolours for the beetles early on. It can give the work the feel of old naturalist's studies. However, as the project went on, I realized that more than watercolour would be needed to bring out the richness of texture and metallic colour on some of these little animals.

Here's a look at Xenorhipus:

Xenorhipus, one of the more colourful jewel beetles for this commission. © Glendon Mellow

This painting required a lot of stippling.  The Intuos 3 graphics tablet has 1024 levels of pressure, so you can achieve some subtlety of colour depending on how hard you press.  It's one of the main features of working on a desktop that remains superior to the iPad version.

Here's an up-close look:

Up close, closer than I look while actually painting, you can see metallic green pain near the top swathed in more liquid greens. The little greyish tadpole strokes in the bottom half show how varying pressure even in a single stroke can add to the detail. 

A few of the beetles were shiny brown shades, others were multiple bright metallic shades. Another nice feature in ArtRage is you can store and name specific palettes.  Here's one of mine, for Trachys:

Custom colour palette for Trachys, the most brilliant of the subjects. You can see the point of grey chosen on the colour palette at right that I've listed as "grey dots". I found that often, the colours I chose needed to be more brilliant than the ones in the photo references to "read" similarly to the eye. 

I also saved a custom brush that I found was useful for fine detail, hairs and lines on a number of the beetles. Here's a sample of a few light-colour brushstrokes on a dark ground from the painting for Texania:

Custom brush menu. You can save multiple menus, and make them available to more than one file. I've placed some brush strokes on the white area beneath the menu so you can see what they look like without the rest of the bug's head.

If you'd like to learn how to save your own custom tools, I made a short video tutorial last year:



ArtRage is powerful for painting, but sometimes a little less perfect for editing. A couple of the beetles had a kind of "squashed banana" look to them as a result of me trying to inject more dynamic poses and bending them where they don't bend. When I went in to fix them, I used Photoshop Elements 6, the eraser, free transform and the clone tool.

Here's examples of the bent beetle Paragrilus (left), and unbent (right).

Paragrilus, in a dynamic, twisty, squashed-banana pose on the left, and fixed using Photoshop on the right.

There are selection tools in ArtRage Studio Pro, as well as some tools called templates that can be used and I suspect could have done the job in fixing Paragrilus's tilted back, above. I'll have to experiment some more. In this case, I went with tools I already knew to make the correction, and ArtRage allows you to save files in Photoshop's .psd format, even keeping layers intact.

Have any other scientific illustrators tried using ArtRage to do their work?  I'd be curious to see other examples or get feedback on this project. I would certainly use it again, perhaps even with digital pencils as I become more comfortable with them.

Questions, comments and opinions encouraged below!

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Check out the rest of Beetle Week!

• Day 1: The Challenge of Scientific Illustration
• Day 2: Painting Bugs with ArtRage Studio Pro
• Day 3: Being a Freelancing Dad
• Day 4: Animated Painting of Trachys
• Day 5: The Exhibit

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print ShopFind me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the Scientific American Blog Network!