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Drawing for Science

Pencil sketch of mint leaves

This coming academic year, I’m going to be teaching our intro to research course to the Environmental Science major. I asked a few students what they wanted to see in that course, and was surprised to learn that they wanted more instruction in graphic design and field sketching techniques! It just so happens that I have a bit of background in this (I came about as close to being an art major in college as I did to being a math major…).

Because I wanted to pick some of that background back up, I decided last year to take the Natural History Illustration 101 online course offered through EdX by the University of Newcastle in Australia. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to finish the course last year, so I’m retaking it now. Now, though, I feel like I have a new reason to take it, since my students want some pointers on the material I’m learning. Here are a couple from the first week of class.

First up, a few useful links that I found in the course:

  • Outlines, edges, shading: This is a great video showing some basic techniques to create forms from 2D shapes. What I really like is the emphasis on how to hold a pencil, move your hand/arm, etc. There’s a certain amount of muscle memory involved in drawing. Paul Priestley, the author, seems to have a pretty good series.
  • How to shade basic forms: Specifics of how to shade spheres, cubes, etc. A bit cookbook-y, but these forms are the basis of most objects, so it’s worth investigating them. There are also some ideas about different shading techniques in a different video.

Second, something I noticed from working through the first week’s coursework: you need to actually do the drawing to get better at it, but you also need to have someone else critique it (and you need to learn to critique it yourself). It’s kind of like working on physics problems. I don’t think you can learn physics just by reading the book: you need to work through the problems. So too with drawing. But opening yourself up to constructive criticism is just as important. That way you learn how to become more effective at creating something closer to the image you want to create.

Third: get yourself some good pencils and a sketchbook! Just the feeling of using a good pencil makes me happy. I use Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils (the blue ones). Get a range of hardnesses – the letters refer to how hard or soft the graphite is, and so how easy or hard it is to make a mark. Mine range from H (somewhat hard) to 4B (very soft); the hardness really matters. I like to make light marks with the hard pencil to help me plan where I want to draw; I then make lines and shade with the softer pencils. I also have a kneaded eraser and a hard rubber eraser and a good, solid pencil sharpener. Practice with pencils for a while before using pen, which is a bit less forgiving. In the field, I make sketches using an ultrafine Sharpie on Rite-in-the-Rain paper, but I often wish I could bring my pencil kit.

Not from the course, but also useful: I got a copy of How to Draw What You See by Rudy de Reyna from the library a couple of weeks ago. It has some pretty good exercises that bridge the gap between those fundamental videos and the more applied material in a course like the one I’m taking. I also picked up a copy of The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, which I found inspiring but a bit hard to work through at my skill level… I put it down until later. But I still recommend it.

So: in the spirit of sharing what I did, some drawings…

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Geology as Quilts

Sometimes you make the darndest connections on Twitter. Like a few weeks ago, when Nadine Gabriel tweeted this:


Here is a tweet from a geologist halfway around the world about an art exhibit less than an hour from me. That’s a fun connection. But also: how often do you get to see a geology-themed art exhibit? I had to go.

I had the chance to go to that exhibit (The Contact: Quilts of the Sierra Nevada by Ann Johnston) today, the day before it closed. The Bellevue Arts Museum was mostly empty, and I went alone, so I got to take my time and look closely at the fabric art, which spanned the entire third floor of the museum. The exhibit benefited from close inspection: there’s even more geology in the works on display than I’d originally thought. Plus, downstairs was an exhibit of new works by emerging glass artists that had some interesting petrologic parallels.

The Contact: Sheepherder's Ledge (2016) - A geologic map of part of the Eastern Sierra, in quilt form.
The Contact: Sheepherder’s Ledge (2016) – A geologic map of part of the Eastern Sierra, in quilt form. A stitched curve outlines the artist’s family’s mining claim, and stitched “x” marks are prospects from the 1860s-70s.

What struck me was the degree to which an understanding of the geology informed the artwork. These quilts weren’t simply illustrations of geology: they were a way to deeply understand a landscape, both through analysis and creation. Apparently, Johnston’s family own the rights to a mining claim in the Eastern Sierra Nevada – it’s delineated with a thin thread on this quilted geologic map. I can imagine that , having grown up with this claim in the family, someone who is both an artist and a geographer (as Johnson is) would want to explore it from both perspectives.

A lot of my own work deals with fabric in the geologic sense: the arrangement of mineral crystals in a rock. In this sense, fabric is a three-dimensional thing: something that pervades a rock but may change from one part of an outcrop to another or even across one hand sample. Fabric is also something that, most of the time, you need to look closely at to be able to interpret. I was impressed by the detail and three-dimensionality of the (textile) fabric in this exhibit. In most of the pieces, the stitching added a layer of information beyond the fabric’s dye and reflectivity – in the same way as a rock’s fabric gives a geologist information beyond the rock’s composition.

For more images, click the gallery below.

The Contact: Eureka Chimney (2013): Stitches in this quilt of a collapsed mine tunnel add 3-dimensional detail to the piece. This patterning, while it doesn’t look exactly like a realistic rock fabric, has some of the same features. I especially like the detail on the tan and white blocks on the left edge of the quilt.
The Contact: 07.25.12 19:55 (2015) – I especially like how the stitches differentiate between the dark, fractured rock (gabbro?) in the foreground, the rock across the lake, and the sky.
The Contact: Cirque 1 and Cirque 2 (2016): The same cirque (glacially-carved amphitheater) at different times of day.
The Contact: Cirque 2 (2016): The detail here is amazing. Notice how the stitches take jogs to indicate slight changes in topography – stream valleys?
The Contact: Nevadan Orogeny (2011): Both the stitching and dyeing/printing here are incredibly detailed. The Nevadan Orogeny was a mountain-building event in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, during which the Sierra Nevada was probably a range of high mountains and active volcanoes, much like today’s Andes. The buckling and warping of the stitches, and the twisted, slashed fabric gave me a visceral impression of the forces at work down deep as a mountain chain rises.
The Contact: Vertical Joint (2013): I like the light and dark here, and the grain that the stitching makes. The fabric itself is spattered with dye or paint to illustrate crystals. The spattered fabric seems more plausible as rock here than in some of the other pieces – I can’t quite put my finger on why.
The Contact: Sierra Honeymoon (2015): I never thought of rocks in a particularly romantic way, but here two rock types (a darker one, presumably a gabbro, and a lighter, granitic rock) are held together by a few thin intrusions. The other side of this quilt is a sunset scene, with two figures silhouetted atop a ridge. Maybe one can take a metaphor too far, I don’t know. But to my unromantic mind, the two intrusions remind me that we geologists sometimes call magmatic bodies that cross two disparate regions of rock “stitching plutons,” making this a visual pun.
The Contact: Inside Granite (2015): This is a pretty faithful view of what you’d see in a microscope when looking in polarized light at a thin section of a granitic rock, like those from the Sierra Nevada. Much of the gray and white is supposed to be quartz or potassium feldspar (microcline; probably the gray at the bottom). There is a striped piece of plagioclase feldspar on the right, and what looks like biotite mica crystals in shades of orange, red, and green on the left. The black may be an oxide mineral – I’m not sure. I love how Johnson uses the stitching and color here to emphasize both the minerals’ microscopic structural features (cleavage planes of the mica, twin planes in the plagioclase) and the way the minerals’ shades change as you turn the microscope stage (called extinction; quartz and microcline fade in and out of black in a characteristic wave-like or patchy way – see the microcline crystal at the bottom).
The Contact: Inside Granite (2015): A detail.
The Contact: Cross Polarized Granite (left, 2015) and Cross Polarized Gabbro (right, 2014): Oh. My. Goodness. This is really what it’s like to look at these rocks in a polarizing (petrographic) microscope. But again, there’s more than that. The range of scales represented by pieces in this show is striking: these images represent crystals that are maybe a few millimeters long. In contrast, the areas that the geologic map and landscape quilts represent are several tens of kilometers wide. And yet the mineral grains here – the color fields and stitching patterns – are what produce the fractures and rock fabrics illustrated – also by color fields and stitching patterns – in pieces like Nevadan Orogeny and 07.25.12 19:55.
The Contact: Cross Polarized Gabbro (2014): Detail.
The Contact: Cross Polarized Granite (2015): My favorite detail of the whole show. This is a pleochroic halo (black) around a zircon crystal (blue). Zircon crystals often contain quite a bit of uranium. Particles produced from radioactive decay of the uranium damage the crystal structure of whatever is around the zircon crystal. This causes the optical properties of the damaged zone to change, often making a halo around the zircon crystal change colors as you turn it in polarized light. This play of colors is called pleochroism. It makes it easy to find zircon and other radioactive minerals, which can then be used to date the rocks they come from.
The Contact: 07.25.12 20:13 (2015): A sky like biotite…
Kim Brill – Plaza Blanca, New Mexico: Investigations (2016): From the Emerge 2016 exhibit. Glass art that looks geological. There’s a pretty huge overlap between glass art and experimental petrology.
Kiln-formed glass techniques, from the Emerge 2016 exhibit. More overlap between experimental petrology and glass art!