Buddha's Hand

A journal entry & illustration from1640 about intersecting issues of perception, imaging, and culture.  Lemons in southeast asia occasionally respond to an infection in this way, but are given cultural value as a separate fruit which resembles Buddha's hand.  Each lemon has a different shape, making creating an image "type specimen" impossible.

Tree of Life- then and now

 

About Tufts EXP-16-S

We are a modern Cabinet of Curiosity!  Why? We are a community of artists/scientists/naturalists who have gathered at the Barnum Biological Sciences Laboratory at Tufts University to explore traditional art making and modern visualization of the natural world.  
We learn and teach traditional art techniques, consider the latest advances in bioimaging and biorobotics, and explore the ramifications of advances in neuroscience as it impacts vision and perception.  
We journal extensively in the same small black journals used by writers, field scientists, and artists worldwide called moleskines.  
We endeavor with digital, landscape, 3-d, and 2-d artworks utilizing telemetry, watercolor, raw pigments, Google maps, mud, digital cell phones, seaweed, YouTube, x-rays …. whatever we can lay our hands on.  We paint from live birds, reptiles, and mammals.  
We value genome research and art history equally.  And we create a sensitivity to seeing and being in the moment while improving our awareness and visual acuity  as a valuable life-long skill. (Image: Stem Cell Art Rorshaks  by Diane Fiedler, comp'd for the Whitehead Institute)

Tufts EXP-16-F Welcome!

I have incorporated my Tufts University course into this blog. You'll find this faster and easier to upload large images  & quick comments to this site.  I hope to move this to learning websites at Tufts as soon as possible, but until then, we can continue the dialogues begun in class.  

200 ft. Pinnacles of Bruny Island Coast

Another sketch of the amazing 200 ft. tall volcanic pillars off the coast of Bruny Island Tasmania.  From my photo into a moleskine journal.  Didn't have time to scan this before the glorious trip to Scandinavia, so I am posting it now.

More Tasmanian Moleskinerie

40-Spotted Pardalote

The female here-- the male has 40 spots and more, plus bright dashes of red about the head and tail.  A birder's dream.  Nope-- we didn't see it.

Tasmanian Devil

Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary had at least a dozen Tasmanian devils when we visited in Jan. 2011. This guys had stopped to sniff the air, poised just like this.  The devils spent most of their time racing racing racing around along paths they had created in their generous, native-habitat landscaped areas.  They run more like piglets than like little dogs, tight and high on their toes. Their back ends bound forward during the center of the lope, sailing high up enough that you wonder if they ever turn a somersault coming off the logs!  The devils have had the very worst luck and may become extinct in our life time. First they were distrusted by hunted early settlers because of their "screams" which are vocalizations over food disputes.  As the Tasmanian tiger became extinct (human predation) the devils switched their strategy from a hyena-like place in the food chain to relying on road kill.  This obviously puts them directly in harm's way.  And now they are being wiped out by the Devil Facial Tumor Disease.  An extremely rare viral cancer, its spread by a ritual communication behaviour where the full expanse of the lips of 2 devils are in complete contact.  For more about this extremely sad situation, go the the website Save the Tasmanian Devil at www.tassiedevil.com.au.  Sounds hopeless?  The Devil, I say-- send money!

Morris the Wombat

Meet Morris the Wombat, whom I met in Tasmania this January (from my moleskine journal).  Morris is an orphan, found on the highway circling the body of his deceased mom. Very sad. In January 2010 he hanging at the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary in Tasmania.  Soon he will be reintroduced back into the wild because he is approaching adolescence-- and will change from his affectionate self into one morose, aggressive wombat until he's in "circulation."  Morris will be using his butt callous to protect himself out there:  Wombats defend themselves from Tasmanian tigers (or now, dogs) by heading deep into their burrow and then, when the predator sticks its nose into the hole, the wombat crushes that snout between his big butt callous and the tunnel roof.... In short, he's a hard ass.

Working with rocks

Rocks pose more of a challenge than most people realize!  (Begin by believing that rock shapes follow their molecular structure-- they do!!) 

  

For granite shoreline rocks, imagine a box with its 8 tips knocked off and softened by surf action.  Imagine dipping a sugar cube into hot tea and quickly removing it-- voila, a square-ish lump!  Next, trust that you can communicate all you need with only 3 values (aka, tones of gray)-- highlights (white or nearly white), midtones (light to middle gray), and shadows (dark gray to black). 

You want  to assign the lightest value-- white to the top surface of the "sugar cube"  because that's where the sun's light is strongest.  Don't worry at first if it's a dark rock, or stained & encrusted from sealife-- you can add that after you have modeled the rocks. If you like, you can mask these areas off with blue painter's tape from the hardward store.  Rip it so that the tape looks more natural.

Now, confirm where the sun is coming from.  You can very lightly draw a cartoon-ish light bulb onto your paper if you are new to this--erase later, of course!  On the side of the rock opposite the lightbulb, add a mid-tone wash of a warm, natural pigmented paint, such as yellow ochre.  Use a "flat" brush to do this-- and rather than just filling in the area, design an irregular shape to fit into the side of the rock. Add a smaller abstract shape on top when its dry with a warm blue such as Cobalt or Pthalo/Winsor Red shade. 

Finally, give weight and shadow to the rocks by painting a dark, calligraphic shadow at the base of each rock and its intersection with other rocks.  Do not outline the rock all the way around, no matter what!  Less is more.  Use a raw umber full strength... add variety into this shadow by mixing in a little Pthalo blue, black and Burnt Sienna from time to time.

Perspective is also very important portraying rocks.  At the Tesselated Rocks National Park in Tasmania, columnar basalt has been eroded by salt crystals and water action into "loaves" (which are lumpy like sugar cubes) and "pans," which act as shallow rectangular bowls at the edge of the Tasman Sea.

How amazingly literal can this perspective be???  If you need to clarify the light & dark tones even more, remember that you can always photocopy/Photoshop it into a high-con black & white image.

Note how I have simplified the shapes and shading in my journal entry, based on this photo. How embarrassing that the drawing doesn't look like my husband-- he looks like the guy in Glee, which I had just watched before drawing the image!!  (It happens...)

Study the work of master teacher & watercolorist Carlton Plummer AWS for his amazing simplicity and facility with painting "sugar cube" rock forms.  His paintings of the Maine coast will inspire you for years to come.  See a fabulous example below from Plummer's book Create Dramatic Coastal Scenes in Watercolor (ISBN 1-929834-37-3).

Hellebores in Umbers, Magentas, Viridian

Beginnings in Yellow Canoe

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