Science Times May 14, 2012

This week’s illustration had an interesting evolution. The story was about the discovery that a cave painting found in France is older than previously believed, and now one of the oldest examples of ancient art:

Or so I thought. There was one line in the unedited text about how the paintings featured some fairly graphic depictions of the female figure, and after the sketch was approved (bearded cave figure), the column ended up focusing on this prehistoric quasi-porn. OK, I guess maybe for some people cave porn is more interesting, so we did a quick switcheroo on Monday afternoon (thank you, Photoshop magic):

Science Times February 26, 2008

I think you learn something on every job. This spot taught me that the success of an illustration has nothing to do with how long it takes you to finish it. The column was about a new self-healing rubber. Essentially, one elastic band could last you forever. Enough said:

Science Times April 16, 2012

This column was about how mountain pine beetles have started reproducing twice a year instead of once. The problem is that they lay their eggs in the bark of trees and the resulting population boom means pines are being wiped out by the millions. It’s funny the way you will stare at the paper for who knows how long with nothing, and then something clicks and in ten minutes you have five pretty good sketches:

The first idea was that the stork was delivering so many larvae that its weight broke the limb of the tree. OK. I liked that as an image, and I really liked the beetle “dividing” into the trees, but that may have worked better in theory than as an actual spot. The tree saw was pretty good, but the art director liked the bottom two best. We kicked it around for a minute and decided the needle-less pine/family tree covered all the bases:

Science Times April 30, 2012

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the incredible wonders of nature. I told her about that fungus that makes an ant climb up onto a leaf and then kills it and explodes spores out of its head to rain down on other ants. If it sounds crazy now, you should see it happen.

Amazing. And that’s how I feel pretty much every Thursday when I sit down with these articles, like this one about bowerbirds. These fantastic birds collect and meticulously arrange brightly colored objects around their nests in order to attract a female for mating. Here is a photo of one of these bowers:

Amazing. The recent discovery about this ritual is that the birds are actually cultivating plants with ornamental fruits near their bowers to use in the displays. Even more amazing! Here are the sketches that didn’t make it:

Someday they’ll regret passing on those ornamental berry underpants, but I was very happy to finish this one:

The same friend I mentioned above brought to my attention that Kelly Ripa reads from Science Times every Tuesday on Live with Kelly. This morning I watched the video online and sure enough, there’s the bowerbird (click on it to see a larger image):

Pretty cool…

Science Times April 10, 2007

This is another one of those spots I would finish a little differently now, but I still love the idea just the way it is. The article was about how the flight pattern of a fruit fly is a mix of straight lines and 90 degree turns. This energy inefficient way of flying is actually a strategy that increases their chances of finding food. As you can see here, the art wasn’t archived with the column.

Science Times December 4, 2007

In keeping with the brain theme, here is one from the archives about chimps outperforming college students in a numerical pattern memory test. I believe it.

It’s funny when I dig out some of these older illustrations…some I would draw differently now, or choose better colors, and then others, like this one, I would do exactly the same. I remember working on these sketches very clearly. I was printing photo references of the brain and in one of them the folds looked like a 3 and an 8. Is that cheating? Hmm.

Science Times March 26, April 2 and April 9, 2012

I never planned to group more than one spot into a post. The whole reason I started this blog was to give each week’s illustration its due. But, for three weeks in a row, the column had to do with the brain, and it seemed like a good idea to look at them all together. It was tricky doing the sketches for these and trying to avoid using the same brain imagery over and over, especially that last week.

The first story was about how people who watch a dance performance will exhibit muscle responses in their brain similar to those of the dancers. Here are the sketches:

I put the little dot on there to say that the brainy tutu was my favorite, and happily it won out:

The following week’s column was about new research regarding foreign language. Neuroscientists were able to use EEGs to show that immersion learners had similar brain activity as native speakers. This was a tough one and I only sent a couple of ideas, and this was the pick:

The final week of the brain triathlon was about a correlation between elite soccer athletes and high intelligence.  The study found that the best players also tested very highly for executive functions like planning, decision-making and abstract thinking. Here are the sketches that didn’t make the cut:

And here is the keeper:

Science Times March 14, 2012

There are weeks where you get the story and the ideas just flow like water. This was not one of those weeks. Or at least not at first. The blurb basically said that paleontologists had discovered bumps on the teeth of a prehistoric rodent suggesting it had diversified its diet to include more plants. I sat for a long time staring at a blank page before I decided to do some additional reading. It turns out that this change in the rodents’ diet meant that they were able to outlive dinosaurs by adapting their food sources over time. I liked the image of these animals interacting with dinosaur artifacts and so I tried a few sketches with bones and fossils and footprints, and then I had the a-ha! moment that everyone waits for:

Bam! Teeth bumps and leaves, here is the final:

 

Science Times November 13, 2007

This column was about the popularity of a fermented chocolate drink in ancient civilizations of Central and South America. I remember stressing over these sketches; I couldn’t think of any solution that didn’t end up looking like coffee or like someone getting drunk. I ended up simplifying the image to just chocolate and that helped bring it all together. The final foil-wrapped chocolate pyramid is still one of my favorites.

Science Times June 17, 2008

This column is dear to my heart. According to this study, the aroma of coffee has a similar stimulant effect to drinking it. I wish I kept the sketches for some of these older spots to compare to the finals, but something tells me I couldn’t have distilled it more than this. I guess I sent alternates for this because there is a more coffee-colored version on nytimes.com, but I archived this one.

Science Times February 27, 2012

Space columns are the best. This one was about the recently discovered planet GJ1214b, and how it is made up of mostly water. I sent four ideas, but I was really torn between these two:

I know the rules about words and charts, but I like making these illo-graphics, I think it’s fun. But I also loved the idea of doing the Aquarius constellation dumping water onto the new planet (you can see I penciled a star on the sketch). Even looking at them now, I’m still not sure which I would pick. Thankfully, Peter Morance was good enough to step in make the call for me and I finished up the pie chart. I recently acquired some old science texts with beautiful graphics and I tried to bring some of that to the final.

Science Times November 7, 2006

It’s really been fun digging through these old spots, and this is another one of my favorites. The column was about how the excavated frescoes from Pompeii have started getting darker due to chemical reactions involving chlorine. I have always loved cartoons and comics with a fourth wall element like Sam’s Strip or Duck Amuck, and so I wanted to have the man from Pompeii interacting with the actual darkening processes.

 

Science Times February 20, 2012

As I mentioned in a previous post, this is my stand-in bird. The article aggregated data from 80 different species so I needed a kind of “everybird”. The column was about how changes in weather can cause birds to stray from their mates. Here are the ideas I sent:

I loved the idea of using birdhouses somehow – as a symbol of the “marriage”, or to show a home-wrecker or broken home. I also thought a lipstick kiss print on a white feather “collar” could be a nice image. In the end, we decided the progression from two birds to one would say it all.

Science Times February 27, 2007

This is one of my all-time favorites. It was a story about how Columbus’s second settlement in the New World was a complete disaster. They landed in what is now the Dominican Republic and attempted to find gold and silver. Between natural and unnatural disaster and botched attempts at mining ore, they abandoned the failed settlement within four years.

Science Times January 30, 2012

I have a superstition with my assignments; I have to start the sketches on the printout of the email that the job came in. This is how they look:

I put those little arrows in because those two made it to the final sketch package here:

The column begins by explaining how water temperature affects the gender of green turtle offspring. Marine biologists feared that climate change related to global warming would create a gender imbalance, and that would lead to inbreeding within the turtle populations. The males however have adapted their mating patterns to include many partners as well as traveling long distances to mate with other females. That’s a heck of a lot for one illustration, and really all we needed to say was this:

Science Times May 24, 2005

This one goes way back to 2005, and in fact was the last illustration for Science finished in watercolor and ink (kinda sad). This story was about the Red-bellied Piranha and how it’s actually more fearful than fearsome. Here is the final, which as you can see from the link, was not archived with the column.

And here is a detail:

Science Times January 23, 2012

I am still not entirely sure I get this one. Basically, dew drops travel up a blade of grass, against the pull of gravity, because they can lower their energy state by doing so. I only sent two ideas for this column – a Sir Isaac Newton sketch with an apple falling down while a dew drop “fell” up, and a simple dew drop reclining after working his way to the tip of the grass:

In honor of my own exhaustion (our son was about 36 hours old while I was doing these sketches), the art director chose the latter. The image on the left with the background ran online while the silhouetted version ran in print.

Science Times January 9, 2012

I rarely concern myself with trying to capture the details of the animals in the column unless it’s essential to the story. If it’s about a bird, I use the same bird I use for everything. Same for cats or fish or amoebas. The idea is what matters, after all. But when it comes to the zebra finch, for whatever reason, I always try my best to get it right. They are pretty amazing little birds, and I’m guessing, a favorite of experimenting scientists based on the number of times they have appeared in Observatory. This column reported that fledgling zebra finches, previously thought to lack the olfactory sense altogether, can actually identify their relatives by scent. That’s a lot to work with for the sketches, and at first I tried just “bird smell” images like the bottom two. Then I started to think how I could illustrate “bird relatives”? So, first I played with eggs in a nest, and then the family tree idea, which worked pretty seamlessly with the birds, and right there I thought I had it.

Turns out less is more, I should have known…

Science Times October 17, 2006

I had been illustrating Observatory for two years when I got this column about scientists trying to vaccinate an entire population of wolves. This was one of those charmed spots where all the pieces fit perfectly into place.  Six years later this is still one of my favorites.

Science Times January 16, 2012

The column from this past week was about a discovery related to an early primate toe fossil. The fossil revealed a grooming claw that had evolved from a flat nail. Over the years, I have had some of my best “smart” solutions for Science Times, but some weeks all it needs is a little funny. I decided to go for a play on the grooming claw, and those foam manicure things, something about those is just funny to me. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I love the imagery of fossils trapped in the earth, it’s one of those visuals that’s just forever rattling around upstairs and keeps coming out in my sketches.

As you can see, we alternate between a one-column vert and a two-column space depending on the idea, but this spot was so much stronger as a vertical. This one finished up very quickly, which is always a good sign that we picked a winner.