- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab .
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for the Division of Extension,
and on behalf of those folks and their other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you
Jacki Whisenant.
She's a scientific illustrator
in the Department of Entomology here
going for her master's degree.
She was born in Madison,
and went to school at James Madison Memorial High School
on the west side of Madison.
Then she went to a university called
the University of Wisconsin-Madison
where she double majored in both art and music,
so she has a BFA.
And she plays the pedal harp for your performing instrument.
Then she went to Cal State in Monterey Bay in California,
and got a degree in scientific illustration.
She is currently back here in Madison
getting a master's degree in entomology.
She also collaborates with the insect ambassadors
with the Huisken Lab,
and with the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection.
Got all those.
Tonight she's going to talk with us about
visualizing science.
I think it's going to be great to see
what she has to share with us.
Please join me in welcoming, Jacki Whisenant,
to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
(applause)
- Hello, thank you all for being here, I'm
like he said, I come from a background of art,
and I'm trying to unite that with entomology
to specialize in entomological illustration.
And so from that there are so many facets
of the scientific illustration world,
which can span the sciences
from physics and chemistry to astronomy,
but my particular angle
is from the natural history side of things,
so with entomological specimens,
but the natural world in general.
So I want to take you back a little bit
through where we're coming from historically,
and then where we're going, and where we are currently.
So what is?
When you think of scientific illustration,
usually, I like to do a little back and forth,
but for recording purposes
that's not really a super viable option.
Some things that people have thrown out
during these kind of discussions
what is scientific illustration?
It's something that illustrates a process,
or can illuminate
any sort of like microscopic part of scientific inquiry,
but with all of the things that people usually think of,
and throw out there,
the main thing that you can distill down
from scientific illustration
is that it is art that explains science in a visual way.
Like I said we're going to talk just quickly.
I have so many favorite artists.
I just kind of want to pop a few up there for you guys.
History of the field.
What are illustrations specifically good for?
Because the number one question you get as an illustrator
is why don't you use a photograph?
So we're going to answer that question,
or at least address it a little bit,
and look at some of the tools that we use old and new,
and look at, again,
some of the applications specific to
that are advantageous to use illustrative practice.
So way back looking back in the history
of scientific illustration
you can go across the world,
and look at how different cultures are using visual methods
to illuminate aspects of, you know, cultural knowledge
of plant medicine,
or exploratory knowledge of what is out there in the world.
Many of the medieval herbaria
some of those you can actually identify the plants
from these drawings that people were using
to document what they knew about the natural world,
and to pass that on as kind of recorded information
rather than just passed down orally.
There's, also, in that kind of
more European tradition of age of explorer
going to new places
that they as Europeans had not been to,
and sort of bringing back new knowledge
of these new and interesting places,
there was always some type of artist
associated with the expedition
if they were doing things properly,
so you would have somebody go out,
and either if it's a scientific expedition
you would collect specimens and bring them back,
so that people can learn about what these new plants are
from South America, from Africa.
So illustrators in order to avoid spending too much time
you have to distill your information.
So on the far right we have kind of an example
of one of those explorer type sketchbooks
where you're not going to draw a plant
and color all the leaves
because you have a limited amount of paint,
and a limited number of pieces of paper,
so you're going to color one leaf,
one half of a symmetrical flower,
just like everything
that you possibly can cram onto one page
you're going to do that,
and then bring it back to illuminate at your leisure.
So just kind of continuing the age of explorer's vein,
Edward Wilson.
This is a place where photography is definitely a thing,
but when you're going out to document penguins
you don't really want to waste plates.
And have them, y'know,
maybe that's not the most efficient use
of your limited photographic materials,
but Edward Wilson was the biologist,
and the medical doctor of this particular expedition, and
his drawings of penguins are some of the earliest
that the world had ever seen
of particularly Emperor penguins,
and their nesting habits and rearing habits.
So it was a really phenomenal way for the artist
to (laughing)
to contribute to a scientific expedition and exploration.
One of my favorites, Maria Sibylla Merian,
was an artist working in the 1700s
who was quite unusual in that
she traveled alone twice to Surinam to document
the insect life, and the insect life cycles there.
She's called the mother of entomology
because she was one of the first to visually document,
and really categorize the phenomenon of metamorphosis
where previously people thought,
oh, things just spring up from mud,
flies arrive from mud,
meat will spontaneously generate maggots, or whatever.
So being able to raise insects, track them,
and prove that, or not prove,
show definitively that there's a sequence
where these creatures completely metamorphose
into something that looks very different
was a very new process of that time,
a new thing that she was very prolific in both visualizing,
and then documenting.
She published a couple of books on the insects of Surinam.
And yeah, was really a huge player in the field there.
You can't talk about scientific illustrations
without talking about Ernst Haeckle because ...
Or Haeckle.
He is absolutely one of the most
phenomenal illustrators just from history,
and not only are his drawings exquisite,
but they are also really scientifically accurate.
I just want to take you into the bat image there
because it is completely adorable.
You can identify to this day, I know, right? (laughing)
(audience laughing)
That these particular bats are what he was looking at,
and what he was documenting with these plates.
Again, John James Audubon
was part like he drew the birds,
his studio drew the background that kind of thing.
So he really changed the field of ornithological
(laughing)
just
of illustrating birds in their habitats,
or doing things rather than just sitting there
flat on a page being like I'm a bird.
It's birds doing, building nests,
interacting with their environments,
that was something
that Audubon's approach changed in the field.
Then, of course, our wonderful Beatrix Potter
of Peter Rabbit fame
was also a very accomplished mycological illustrator,
so she illustrated mushrooms,
and not only drew the beautiful pictures of them,
but pictures that included features
that facilitated their identification.
So accuracy of scientific illustration
right there on the page.
(laughing)
This is just a little bit of the educational
scientific illustration materials
that are at the UW Zoological Museum
in their historical collection,
and that's something that using images to teach
can you imagine just trying to physically describe
the three kinds of lice, (laughing) body lice,
in the lower left there,
where if you have a visual you can just be like boom,
head lice, crabs, body lice, boom, that kind of thing
where you have that picture for educational identification.
So that nagging question it's a good question,
and it's one that I enjoy answering over and over
(laughing)
is why do you not use a photograph for?
Or why can't you just use a photograph?
Is usually how it's phrased.
And photographs are great.
I'm not knocking photographs in any way.
They're really really great for getting precise information,
and detail, especially, with all the many imaging techniques
it's fascinating and incredibly wonderful,
but, specifically, what illustrations might be good for
in lieu of a photograph would be something
where you get immediate, quick, get right to the point
this is the thing that we're talking about, go.
So a thing, a photograph, again, is wonderful and fantastic,
and full of information, so full of information,
sometimes that it just gets really overwhelming.
When you need to be looking at
entomological stuff just keeps ...
If you were going right here
you need to count the hairs on a fly's little back,
(laughing)
which is part of, y'know, how we identify down to family,
genus, and sometimes species
you count the positioning of the hairs, which is great,
but if you have so many other little setae,
and little like illuminations, or shines, or something
that's physically kind of getting in the way
of what you need to see
having just a diagram showing,
okay, there's four, two of them are smaller,
this is that particular family.
Something where you can just distill it down
to what you need to see what exactly information
you're actually trying to focus on.
Views that photographs cannot capture
would be something that's either incredibly huge,
like a cross section of a volcano or a planet.
That's not something you can really capture on film,
and, also, y'know, cross sections in general
you can split a flower in half and kind of y'know, scan it.
That, actually, sometimes works pretty well,
but if you want to really distill out,
okay, this many anthers per side
of this bilaterally symmetric flower making things,
just, again, as really clear and concise,
and easy to see and distill as possible
depending on your application, of course.
And then one thing that is not often brought up
is that the camera angle with its fisheye lens,
again, depending on what kind of camera you're using
will potentially distort what you're photographing.
And this was actually a big problem for paleontologists
in the mid 1900s where they were taking pictures
of these reconstructed dinosaurs,
and making assumptions at how they walk,
but since the photographs were taken obliquely
they're getting a different look
at what the bones were like.
So this is just a quick taking a photograph
of a perfect square from a slight angle
you get not a perfect square anymore.
There's distortion, there's change
that you have to either be really very careful about
how you're taking your photograph, or combine it with
imagery that can, y'know, adjust for that sort of change.
So I'm going to cycle through a few examples
of the illustrations--the strength of illustration.
So taking an interior view or a cutaway.
So you have a lovely fanged deer.
These are super cool.
There's a related species over in the Racine Zoo,
like I had no idea.
So, yes, water deer have these crazy fangs.
They actually move when in different scenarios
that the deer might encounter,
whether it's relaxed and they need to graze.
You kind of move them back,
you can pull these teeth back in their sockets,
so it can graze,
and not just y'know, have fangs scraping through the mud.
So if we're looking at that you can actually see
deep into the socket, and combine that, again,
so you can see a living animal,
and the skull inside y'know, kind of thing like that.
Again, going to very large scale cutaway views.
This is a friend of mine, Phil Krzeminski,
who does amazing space stuff
(laughing)
where he's looking at one of the moons,
and the layering and stratification
of that particular planetary body,
which is something, again, that you need to visualize
as kind of just a more artistic rendering,
but an informed artistic rendering.
Looking at things that you cannot necessarily be guaranteed
to carefully shave away the layers of dirt
see inside a nesting bee's burrow,
and watch it being parasitized by a velvet ant, y'know.
It's not something that you're, you have to
I mean, you're going to have to quest for ages and ages
to find that perfect view,
but if you kind of know what they're doing,
and put those two together
you can recreate a species interaction that,
that will show what you're trying to do,
or trying to communicate just as effectively.
So this is a couple different things we have.
Oops, this one's not species infections,
but it is compressing that sort of looking at
the ecdysis when an insect is emerging from its exoskeleton
to become a slightly larger nymph,
or when it's going through metamorphosis as this one is
to transition from a nymph to an adult insect.
In this case, one of the true bugs.
Again, we have
(laughing)
a cutaway the insect in its habitat.
We have species interactions happening
with parasitizing little wasps,
parasitizing with lovely tomato hornworm,
and we're also compressing a timeline.
So this is a multistage parasitism sequence
where you have the top larger wasp
laying its eggs inside the caterpillar,
which would eventually develop into the puffy cocoons
that are growing out of it.
And then in a future, y'know, a few weeks later,
what you would see is within that circle,
the tiny little hyperparasitoid, a secondary parasitoid
would be laying its own eggs inside the cocoons
to take advantage of that food source.
So you've got a double interaction happening.
Just compress that couple of weeks down into one moment
to better communicate what you're trying to look at.
For illustrating you can also exaggerate behaviors
depending on your audience
you can kind of cartoonify things down
to be a little bit clearer about like the range of weevils.
Maybe it's too cold for them.
If they're really strong
you're never going to catch that on camera (laughing).
(audience laughing)
That's just something that you can use as well (laughing).
For compressing timelines you can also have that sort of
how-to step-by-step comic approach,
and this was done for the wonderful Huisken Lab last year,
but showing kind of how to a step-by-step approach
for particular viewing processes.
You can also compress, again,
pressing the timeline to show life cycles.
This is near and dear to any entomologist's heart,
Because (laughing) there's ...
And I apologize for all the entomology stuff
that's kind of like my thing (laughing),
so we have looking at the transitions from an egg to a larva
to a pupa to an adult.
Depending on the type of insect
you're going to see different changes,
you're going to see different behaviors.
You can get that all right on one page
for your educational purposes.
Pulling in Phil's help again.
This was the wonderful cover of
I can't remember which magazine it was,
but it was a cover, a featured cover illustration showing
an extinct relative of the Tinamou bird
during one of the last mass extinctions.
It's both an adorable photograph,
and a tragic scenario of this poor little bird going "Ahhh!"
(audience laughs) running away from its inevitable doom.
(laughing)
So things, also, that are particularly helpful
for scientific illustration would be taking,
well, with butterfly wings
it's pretty easy to take pictures of them,
and kind of cut that out,
but the cutting out of a photograph is in itself
an illustrative process
because you're making executive decisions
on what to include,
but to get a very clear sort of
does it have this type of wing, this type of wing.
If you're narrowing it down
you can have that in a more distilled kind of clear style.
And that's very common for multiple field guides.
Here we have insect-repelling plants,
and other deer with fangs.
There might be a little bit of a theme here.
So things like that where you can actually compare species
side-by-side,
you're never going to stage that as a photograph,
but you can see size comparison all as one
in just kind of one solidified unit.
Again, photograph you get every single detail.
You get the insect,
or whatever you're taking a picture of exactly as it is
where this is actually a great photograph I love it,
but I wanted to showcase it
because it is the smallest beetle,
free-living beetle in the entire world.
It is 0.3 millimeters long,
and so taking that from a photograph
to kind of a concept illustration you have clarification
of like what the little leggies are doing,
kind of even out the antennae (laughing),
and then show it at scale next to a paramecium,
granted kind of a big paramecium,
(audience laughing)
but still 0.3 millimeters long
smaller than a fairly large paramecium
single-celled organism,
you have this amazing beetle.
Similarly, again, distilling down what is in a photograph,
you have all the background information,
you have light glancing off of the scales.
Maybe the fish is not turned quite how you need it to be,
so you distill it into an image
that can be used for identification.
So working in scientific illustration
there, you can do traditional media and digital media,
or a combination of the two,
which ends up being the most effective
no matter what you're drawing,
no matter what your approach,
you're generally going to combine
both traditional and digital.
Now what I really like.
I came definitely from a kind of traditional background
with rendering, and graphite, and ink and watercolor.
Again, in California we worked side by side
with digital processes both from first generation
to ultimately cleaning up the image,
so graphite, very very
very, very good at subtle nuanced detail.
So that is something you can get
really fine kind of gradient,
and just like really, really soft,
wonderful line quality
depending on the hardness of the graphite you're using,
or the scale at which you're working.
If you work really big and then make it really small
it can be kind of awesome. (laughing)
For ink, ink is, actually, comparing graphite and ink
when you have an original graphite
that can be wonderful.
The reason that people use ink,
and that sort of stippling technique,
many tiny dots to show gradients,
that is something that is pretty important,
or it was pretty important for reproduction.
Now you can scan in and print a graphite drawing,
and have it look pretty good,
y'know, but historically that was not really the case.
You would get like 30% washout of any of the subtlety tones,
so it just wouldn't reproduce very well.
And illustration is about reproduction
whether it's in a publication,
whether it's in a textbook, or as a print
of what you're drawing.
In general, you need it to be able to reproduce well,
to shrink well,
and graphite is not--used to not be very good at that
because our printers were not awesome (laughing) so,
When you're using ink and stippling if you xerox,
not xerox, but y'know, scan and print,
but essentially xerox an ink drawing
you have stark black against white, those little dots.
Many little dots clustered in one area
you have a heavy dark color.
Fewer dots, again, very light color,
but that's something where you get
every single tiny little dot
will be reproduced pretty exactly
as opposed to getting washed out
like a soft graphite gradient would be.
There is a compromise between the two.
And again, ink is better for like really precise lines
because you're not going to get any smudging.
You're not going to get any ...
You can get really, really fine 0.05 millimeter
kind of pen tips and things
to get just tiny, tiny subtle details,
but a compromise between the two
is something called kukil paper.
That is now a very specialized technique
that it's essentially like bumpy paper.
So if you put a pencil over it, it's like taking a
if you put a piece of paper over a textured surface,
and kind of rub there that's sort of what you're getting.
You're getting pick up of texture of the paper itself,
so you're getting a bunch of little stipple techniques
by just using graphite on this paper.
But again, that...
There's only one producer of kukil paper left
in the United States
where there used to be like three or four
different individual plates where the paper was made.
So it's not really ...
It's not really super necessary for ensuring
reproductive success in your more graphite,
or colored pencil type drawings.
(humming)
A combination of paints,
so watercolor, gouache, acrylic paints.
Those are typically used rather than something like oil
because oil takes two weeks to dry,
and if you're on a deadline
you're not going to sit around for two weeks,
and just be like, "Hang on, I can't scan it yet.
It will stick to the surface," or whatever,
so watercolor is quick, but it's also accurate,
again, depending on how you scale things.
So that is a way you can, well ...
Combining media, getting watercolor
plus a little bit of graphite to firm things up
you have a way to get really kind of
subtle detailed coloration in your drawings,
and whatever imaging you're looking to do.
Again, these are very entomological heavy,
so thanks for bearing with me. (laughing)
(clearing throat)
So watercolor as opposed to colored pencil.
Colored pencil takes longer,
but it's also a little bit more resilient.
Watercolor will fade over time,
so this is more kind of like an archival sort of approach.
Watercolor will fade if in sunlight.
If it's kept under UV protectant you'll be fine,
but colored pencil can get a little bolder.
You can, sometimes,
use kind of a backwards approaching technique
to scratch through the colored pencil,
and kind of get down like hair or setae shine details,
and things like that.
So both are equally valid color approaches
for scientific illustration,
but it really falls down to your preference.
For scaling when you're working in any type of medium,
no matter what you do you want to work a little bit larger
because then when you scale it down
all of a sudden you feel like a total magician
because it just looks so, it looks great, y'know? (laughing)
Just taking that kind of detail and be like, "Oh man,
you must have a used a one hair brush to paint that."
(laughing)
It's a nice little, nice little trick,
but it's not a trick because it's a technique.
(laughing)
(audience laughing)
Oh, I wanted to quick talking about removing the background.
In any, in any drawing that you do
these what I've been showing are mainly spot illustrations,
so here's a species here I want to show it here it is.
So having just, removing--
digitally removing the background gives you flexibility
in where you're going to put that.
If you want to put this insect on a dark background
now you don't have a big white box around it,
and then if you want to reprint it
you don't have an accidental little smudge
off in the corner that's still there in your reproduction,
so it just guarantees that you're going to get the best
reproductive quality possible for one of your drawings.
So some tools that we use from the very traditional
to modern digital which, again, the melding of the two,
I think, finds a really happy place
where you don't have something that's so digitally,
and digital slick kind of like shiny, glossy.
I mean, shiny, glossy is great
if you're doing a shiny, glossy thing,
but having a bit of a combination of texture,
and that sort of traditional
not grit, but that certain, you know, like a little bit
of personality in the drawing can be really advantageous.
So camera lucida.
This is kind of a nice new camera lucida setup,
but that was something that was used way back.
There's tons of them in the UW Zoological Museum
historical instrument collection.
(laughing)
They were basically just little cameras that, not cameras,
mirrors that take advantage of the optical system
of the microscope to project a simultaneous vision
down onto the paper next to your microscope,
so you're looking through the scope,
and you're seeing what's beside the scope,
seeing your paper as well.
So, essentially, you're using this as a tracing tool,
and the advantage of tracing is you're getting
the exact dimensions of the thing you are looking at,
so that you don't
accidentally make the insect's legs bigger.
So when you flip the lever on the scope
you're seeing this double image of your hand drawing
on top of the insect that you're looking at.
So that produces an all right image, it's accurate,
but it doesn't look great
'cause the bug is still kind of dead,
(laughing) y'know,
still just kind of in there,
but, again, what you'd use that for,
and we'll show this same insect in a few slides
is you'll take those measurements of how far
the legs are sticking out and down to reposition,
and make it look nice. (laughing)
So another kind of bringing modern imaging technology
there's a lovely focus-stacking system at the WIRC,
the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection,
which is so phenomenal, it's beautiful.
You get these really, really high resolution stacked images.
You take basically between 10 to 50 stacked images of like
the very top of the insect is in focus,
the next level is in focus, next level, all the way down
until the very last little claw is in focus
right at the bottom,
and then the Zerene Stacker software
will stack them all together,
and put it, make everything unified into one photograph.
One thing I just want to point out for here
is you do want to buffer the light systems,
and I'll show you what happens when you don't.
(laughing)
So after taking photographs
of all of the insects that I'm studying
I had to go and retake all the photographs
'cause I didn't look at them too closely.
I was just like "I know how to do this da-da-da-da,"
and then the top two images you can see
are totally blown out.
You don't want,
when you have white on an image, any whiteness is blowout,
so you won't have no information in that spot.
If the image is a little dark like the ones on the bottom
that's a little better
because you can always kind of brighten it up
the information is still in that image somewhere,
but once it's just like zapped,
that's, yeah, you really can't go back for that.
So the detail of this focus-stacking image
you have these lovely Penthe obliquata tetratomid beetles,
which are super cute,
but they look like they have a little orange spot on them,
and with this imaging system you zoom in,
and you can see every single little hair.
Hair, my professor would kick me.
(laughing)
So hair on insects are setae.
They're not hair, they're hairlike structures.
Hairs are for mammals, okay,
(laughing)
(audience laughing)
but you can see every single one,
but you can also see every single little piece of dust,
and lint and whatever has been landing on the insect
for the past 20 years. (laughing)
So it's like pros and cons.
So we'll take that if you want to maybe make your insect
more symmetrical it has two antennae, obviously,
we're bilaterally symmetrical,
so it makes it a little easier to kind of flip legs,
and make them all lined up,
so it looks like a nice insect.
And from there you can then digitally,
just like we did on the camera lucida
you can digitally trace insects for this example
their antennae to get an exact reproduction
of what that antenna is
so you don't get accidental lengthening of segments.
Because when you get down,
sometimes when you get down to species level
the ratio of the antennal segments
is part of what distinguishes a new species,
so that's kind of cool.
You don't want to make that inaccurate.
And from there forgive this, this is like a really quick
kind of two hour thing, (laughing) not even.
So you can do a drawing based on the measurements from,
from your insect,
and in a perfect world
you'd spend a little more time on that drawing
than this was,
but having that so you have that perfectly positioned animal
for whatever you need to do.
Just quickly,
you notice the antenna are a little bit different.
We have a male antenna on the left,
and a female antenna on the right,
so you can just split them,
and make a male and a female side by side
without doing too much work.
So the digital tools that I use
there are many free alternatives to using Adobe software,
but if you're learning those for a professional context
some of the free alternatives
can be really kind of obnoxious to use,
and I realize that I'm coming at it from somebody
who's familiar with the Adobe products,
but using Photoshop to manipulate your either
scanned images, or remove backgrounds,
or even do digital painting
the system has been around for a while.
It's been under development
from a number of different resources.
This is something in--
I taught a scientific illustration class
through the Art Department last year,
and I spent probably more time figuring out
free alternatives like GIMP and Pixelmator
than I did actually teaching the people
how to actually, how to use it more effectively.
I was just like how does this one even work?
Because there's, you know, uh.
I should not, okay, I'll just drop that subject
because it's just like frustrating, but (laughing).
(audience laughing)
So the advantage, again, of Photoshop
is to do kind of digital painting and arrangements.
The advantage of Illustrator,
which is a vector-based program is something
where you're going to have really smooth lines
if you're doing something a little more
kind of mechanically inclined.
That's a way that you can have,
again, really, really, really smooth lines,
kind of precise measurements of doing infographics,
and things like that if you want like a really graphic,
kind of clearcut look.
Oh, man, (laughing)
I should have made a giant slide
of the advantages of incorporating
digital tools into your pallette.
People say "You did it digitally, why isn't that cheating?"
No, it isn't, yet the digital tool set
is just one more addition
to what you already have in your arsenal
of potential ways to approach an illustration so,
but the huge advantages are using layers,
being able to save, and then pressing undo.
Control, Z is your friend if you're like,
"Oh, no, what have I done?"
You just like, dit, and it's gone, (laughing) so, oh, man,
but you can't like mix too much
because if you're drawing and/or painting,
and you're like, "Oh no, what have I done?"
Control, Z, that gets to be a little bit of a problem.
(laughing)
Something that is pretty much essential
for working digitally nowadays, especially,
is using a digital tablet,
so it's not like you're mouse drawing,
using a mouse and clicking and trying to draw stuff,
which you can, and I've seen people do mouse drawings,
and it's amazing.
But it's basically like a pencil
that you're writing on a digital screen with, so.
The advantage of that, again,
is getting that sort of hand look,
or a more nuanced approach into your cleanup work.
Oh, for Illustrator that's something
we usually think of it as something very graphic,
and very simple and y'know, clear,
but I just wanted to highlight this particular artist
back when Illustrator first came out.
This is something that was made entirely
with vector and graphics,
and so each tiny little speckle on that camera surface
is a tiny little outlined vector drawing,
which is basically like,
a digital, or
it's like a little equation saying
point, point, point, points
arch between the points.
It's, yeah (laughing).
Using gradients and little tiny vectors this amazing artist
works in photorealistic approaches using Illustrator.
Now that is not what Illustrator is made for.
It's just showing what it is capable of.
Oops, I needed to delete that.
We already talked about ecological habitat showing something
in interaction with other eye of the nature.
So, one, just tiny little bit about information design
there's so many different ways to approach
showing data visually,
and these are some artists who...
Well, Minard is one of the historical forerunner.
He's like quoted as the first most successful
illustration, and this is particularly of Napoleon's march
where you're showing a number of people,
the distance that they traveled, and the route.
You can see the numbers of these people and the deserters,
(laughing) and,
and how the army basically starved off into nothingness.
There was illness, there was, again, starvation.
Just a terrible, terrible Napoleonic march that ended
in (laughing) a not very successful campaign,
but seeing that visually
is just kind of like a forerunner of info design.
So I wanted to zoom in on this.
So, xkcd is a very popular kind of science comic
using stick figures,
but it's stick figures with very--interspersed
with extremely well researched and amazing infographics
like this one that he made of relative uses of money
in different just kind of programs,
and departments of the United States,
and just of society in general.
It's kind of incredible where using units,
simple, easy to digest units to create this bigger picture
of something that's almost incomprehensible
in terms of like just masses,
but, yeah, so you can have a chart of numbers,
or you can have a visual thing
that just kind of makes that visual impact.
When doing types of information design
something you just say, "Oh,
your bread and butter is charts and graphs."
When you're doing charts and graphs
you want to make sure not to include red and green
on the same particular visual
because that is the most common type of color blindness,
and you have two lines that look very similar
to somebody who does have red-green color blindness
it's not really communicating
what you're intending to communicate.
And then, also, getting that sort of visual directionality
we as our particular way of reading is right to left.
We're looking at the Minard visual,
we're reading it right,
but then bringing it back down left to right, sorry.
I don't know how to read. (laughing)
We read left to right we're reading that left to right
you kind of want to have the viewer's eye arc around,
and come and highlight the most important parts first.
And that is something just to kind of keep in mind.
When you're directing information
around a scientific poster
if you're having kind of colored spots and directions.
But, or, so,
There's a way to kind of
consolidate numbers into individual units.
This was kind of a more approachable infographic
like for a younger audience,
but also making it kind of visually friendly.
You don't want to make things look too kind of gruesome,
and grisly when you're talking about
a more sensitive subject like entomophagy
where that triggers a more kind of visceral,
emotional no-no response in many people.
You want to be just like, "Look!
Look at this wonderful little cricket.
See how much food it's not eating to produce
an equivalent amount of protein than a pig or a cow?"
So that's something kind of getting that visual
slice of information to, not to prove a point,
but to argue a standpoint
about why it might be more beneficial to eat things
like arthropods which can be very efficiently farmed.
There was a wonderful event just a week, a few days ago,
(laughing)
yeah, last Saturday about entomophagy,
and eating insects where they brought people in
to talk about that which is really cool.
(humming)
So processes when working with an illustrator
you kind of define your project upfront.
You have a sketch stage which may last a while depending on
y'know, if you're juggling different thoughts.
If you're not quite sure what you're looking for
you just kind of want to play around with it a bit.
You have sketch, look it over, sketch, look it over,
because you don't want to take something
from beginning to end and be like,
"Actually, actually I want something completely else."
(laughing)
And if you do that's fine just, y'know, pay for that time
(laughing) kind of thing.
(audience laughing)
Everyone is
y'know, cognizant of that kind of thing.
This sequence of events is from an, actually from an app
that has recently been released as a, in the iPhone version
which is really cool.
It's for identifying butterflies of Yosemite,
and they were looking for a little button to have as the
the icon, the main icon, so they were saying,
okay, I want one of these Yosemite butterfly species.
Okay, well, let's try to do that.
They liked butterfly on
Computime, thank you.
I was like thinking of the most famous one,
but I'm embarrassed that I don't remember, thank you.
(laughing)
Yes, so a couple of different options
you do some quick color studies and things,
and then rendering and final sort of like visualization,
or y'know, wrap up of what is going to be a circular icon.
So with that I just want to say thank you so much
to my main professor, Dr. Dan Young.
The Wisconsin Insect Research Collection,
Curator, Craig Brabant for all of his help with imaging,
learning how to image,
and then also access to the amazing collections.
They do tours there sometimes through the DNR,
the DNR tour series,
but you can also contact Craig directly,
and have a tour of this amazing collection.
My wonderful folks at the Cal State Monterey Bay
'cause I would not be here
without that particular program, thank you.
Thank you all of you for being here,
and listening to me.
And then, especially, to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab
for inviting me, I appreciate it, this is very cool.
And then thank you as well to my amazing family
some of which are here today.
Thank you for putting up with me,
and this kind of circuitous,
or really meandering sort of journey
that has brought me here today.
Oops, wrong way. (laughing)
So I appreciate it, thank you so much,
and let me know if you have any questions.
(applause)