Animal, vegetable, mineral

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Another world


Microctenopoma ansorgii

Collection I


Collection II


Cyclamen

Drimiopsis


Impala / lily


Motivated


Nature morte


Star map I


Twinspot

"Autumn leaves" miniature

This is a miniature inspired by my biggest and possibly boldest painting. Which I haven't shown you yet. I wonder why? Let me try and figure that one out and perhaps remedy it. Same size as the other miniatures, watercolour with a bit of pencil and ink.

"Archaeology - Lagomorpha"

This little drawing of a rabbit skull is inspired by my friend Karin who is writing a thesis on hare bones. The materials are pen, pencil, tea, dirt, salt and paper cutting. The original is only 6x8 cm, as it was done for a miniatures exhibition. The gallery guys liked it a lot, and hopefully I'm going to have a sort of mini-exhibition in September! I'll keep you updated.

A new subspecies. Science!

Phytotaxa just published an article with one of my illustrations in it. It's a new subspecies, Euphorbia melanohydrata subsp. conica. This is the most complicated pen-and-ink drawing I have ever done - most of the time you can get away with just doing a little branch of the plant, but with this one I felt I just had to draw the entire thing, because it is absolutely surreal - like a baby Martian Christmas tree. The article is open access, so you can read the whole thing here.




All those tiny fractal branches and subbranches and live branches and dead branches and flowering branches were so much fun to do. As were the roots. And trying to describe the shape of the plant itself using only branchlet shapes for shading.




A bit of a closeup.

Did you know you can get your latest new-species news on Twitter? I'm not really a Twitter person, but this does strike me as slightly absurd in the best sort of way, so I'm all for it. Here's the Tweet that introduced the world to baby Martian Christmas trees.

My plant tree

My biggest project right now (nearly finished!) is another textbook/notes sorta thing, a lot more technical than the first one. I now know more than I ever thought I would want to about the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, and I've spent hours and hours drawing tiny little cells undergoing meiosis and mitosis. On the good side, I can feel my brain expanding. On the bad side, the results aren't really what you'd call decorative.

One exception is the picture I'm showing you here. It's an illustration of "subdivision of kingdom Plantae" (that was my brief, the rest was entirely up to me. Told you my brain was expanding.) I could have just done a tree diagram with the names of the various divisions, but then I thought "tree diagram, har har" and made an actual tree diagram, with examples of plants from every division growing out of it. I'm hoping it will help the students to envision the relationships between the plants better than a plain wordy diagram would have done.



The copyright for this diagram is going to be transferred to the Tshwane University of Technology.

Two little weeds

While digitally cleaning up and labelling a lot of the drawings from my last project, I realised how much I like these two. They aren't particularly spectacular, just a couple of weeds that I dug up from the garden to show the difference between monocots and dicots. But there's just something about them. They look... poised. I like them.

Busy busy busy

For the last while, when people ask me how I am, I've been replying "Busy". Then I hurriedly add, so as not to seem ungrateful, "Which is good. Lots of work, it's a good thing, when you're trying to make it, you know..." I generally tail off around there, uncomfortable with the entire concept.

On the one hand, I can't stand competitive busyness, the one-upmanship of how close you are to burnout and how very, very hard you work. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if you blithely said, by the water cooler perhaps, "Oh, I'm not particularly busy at the moment. Just taking it easy for a while." The fact is, in a work context especially, it's pretty much mandatory to be "busy" all the time, even when you aren't. And that offends my rebellious little soul.

On the other hand, though, "busy" is a one-word, catchall excuse that's invaluable in explaining yourself to neglected spouses, friends who've forgotten what you look like, clients who've been waiting months for their pictures, blog readers who haven't had a new post in weeks... you know. And when you are genuinely busy, everyone you know falls into one of those categories.

So I'm not entirely ready to give up going on about how busy I am. But the next time I'm being dreadfully, deliciously lazy, I'm planning to make a point of telling everyone about that too.

And this is what I've been busy with: a few of my favourites from that textbook/class notes project I've been working on for months. Over 200 ink drawings, most of them not nearly as detailed as these ones, though!

For Science!

I've been really busy lately. This, when one's income is directly linked to one's busyness level, is unquestionably a good thing. What's odd, though, is that this type of drawing, my main business really when I come to think about it, is seriously underrepresented on this blog.

This sort of thing. Let me introduce you - probably for the very first time - to Commiphora otjihipana. It's a new species in the genus of plants that includes myrrh, and it comes from the Kaokoveld in northern Namibia.

Shades of primary school. These are peas, beans and mealies that I'm sprouting in order to illustrate the germination process for a textbook/set of class notes/thing. That project involves over 200 drawings.

I adore scientific illustration, because I get to sit in a lab and use a microscope, and run around in the veld looking for things, and draw things that no one has drawn before, and feel all science-y. It also caters directly to my inability to stick to one thing. My university professors must have hated me for it. I was always trying to combine, compare, or mash together things that have never before been mashed. It's great. You avoid being bored, because you keep adding information from different fields. And when someone's better than you, you have the infallible comfort of going "Oh well, she can draw better than me, but can she analyse Hebrew verbs?" And the star ancient languages student can't dissect Commiphora flowers, and the botanist can't ride horses, and my horse-riding instructor... oh dear, I think she can do anything. Seriously.

But anyway, it's fun to dance around the edges of things - art/science, science/religion, all three at once. Even though people who prefer to stick firmly in the middle of their own patch and mistrust all others will likely think you flaky, dangerous, and possibly even quite dim, the edges are where the magic happens. (And how flaky did that just sound?)