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Laughing Mantis Studio

Art inspired by biology, created by a biologist

  • The Art of Daniel D. Brown, Ph.D.
    • Woodworking
    • Stained Glass
    • Pastel Pencil
    • Graphite Pencil
    • 3D Digital Art
    • 2D Digital Art
    • Paintings
    • Sculptures
    • Pet Portraits
    • Jewelry & Hangers
    • 3D Animation
    • Ocean Invasion Series
    • Science Art
  • Shop
  • Exhibitions
  • About

Sculpture

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  • Sculpture
Black locust-carved snail
Seahorse from a chair arm
Jewelry Bowl
When the Cows Come Home
I Hear You Have Crabs

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You can see my frequently-updated works-in-progress by following @laughingmantisstudio

laughingmantisstudio

Daniel D. Brown, Ph.D. | Senior Research Scientist | Breast Cancer Research | Pittsburgh, PA.
No commissions/sales
Two cancer scientists I work with will be leaving Two cancer scientists I work with will be leaving the lab soon to continue their journeys. Both of them have gone out of their way to be good friends and colleagues. Daisong @daisongliu_ always supports my art here, and is just generally an incredibly nice, engaging guy. Yian @yiany2325 and I have worked closely on a couple projects (and will hopefully be published together soon!) and she even brought me back a little droid from Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge when she visited. So I figured the least I could do was make them a little something. Two pencil holders cut from the same piece of black walnut that was cut down in my neighborhood years ago. I wish you both all the success in the world!
Since my feed basically just functions as a portfo Since my feed basically just functions as a portfolio these days, I figured I’d get this squirrel box on here. Multi-tiered inside, with covered entry to deter predators like raccoons. All scrap fence cedar. I mounted it to receive morning sun facing east with the tree blocking prevailing winds. BUT I couldn’t really get it as high as I’ve seen recommended (it’s probably like 15’). So it may not get used as a nest. We’ll see! It will definitely be used as a sunning platform. It was fun to build either way. We’ve had a family of squirrels living in our backyard since 2017, and have seen quite a few generations since then. They typically only live 1-2 years because of predation, but can live much much longer. We had 1 female for several years and we knew each other well. @tam_a_ryn was the first to get her feeding from her hand in the line days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The latest tenants were born last spring (the most habituated is “Greedo” - shown in the last clip).
I made some super quick ornaments today featuring I made some super quick ornaments today featuring current pups Kylo & Chewie, former passed on pup Bandit, and late cats Miles, Nina, and Dizzy. I miss them all! Also fun fact: “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” by Zeppelin is about Robert Plant walking his dog Strider (unsurprisingly named after the Lord of the Rings character, aka Aragorn). The final shot is how they were made: some cheap laser prints, a piece of tulipwood aka “poplar” (not a poplar), and some ModPodge. Two perpendicular coats makes it look a bit like canvas and gives nice texture. Cut out on scrollsaw. … #petornaments
Another student gets a degree and some wood by me Another student gets a degree and some wood by me to commemorate it! Congrats to my friend Dr. Jie Bin (Jay) Liu @jbliu0302 on getting half of his PhD/MD complete after successfully defending his dissertation today (he still has a little ways to go to earn the MD part). This is the 12th or so of these I’ve made over the years! Featuring Pittsburgh’s yellow bridges, I think I’ve settled on this design for PhD plaques - it’s very similar to the last one I made for Dr. Neil Carleton last year. Scrollsawed from curly maple, black walnut, yellowheart, and some mahogany/sapele-like tropical hardwood I got off an international shipping pallet used to ship @leonardodefrisbio’s cell culture incubator many years ago. I’m a pack rat… 📸 by @insta_.insa
Just posting these panels because I want them on m Just posting these panels because I want them on my profile. They turned out purty I think. I’ve never painted transparent wings before, so that was fun to try. I obviously could have gone a lot further with the painting. But this is an outdoor piece and the paint will probably be destroyed in a season or two anyway. Some of you pro scrollsawyers probably thought “Why TF did he grain-align and cut so many the pieces if he was just gonna paint it?!” (I already know @evergreen.daydreams did) Yeah I asked myself the same thing the whole time 😂 My initial justification was that cutting each piece like I do will end up with a tighter fit than simply segmenting a single board (which is true). Also having more or less random grain directions makes for more dimensional stability in the final panel. Enough to matter? Almost certainly not. But whatever - that’s how I did it. I’d probably do the next one a bit differently. The fit was so tight, you can’t even tell some of them were individual pieces. Like those closed pink buds are like 5 pieces each and could easily have just been 1. 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️
I have 20-30 native plant species on our property I have 20-30 native plant species on our property now producing seeds. I decided to share them with our neighborhood (and bring awareness to the necessary intervention by humans to fight biodiversity loss, which planting natives can help). I’d love to see Greenfield (Pittsburgh) significantly greener! So I designed and built this “Little Free Seed Library” with two pseudo-intarsia panels (“pseudo” because they’re painted). Featuring a leafcutter bee on swamp milkweed on one side and black-eyed susans on the other. Sign by @tam_a_ryn. Built almost completely with scraps from the shed I built a few years ago. … #littlefreelibrary #nativegarden #nativeplants #biodiversity #pollinatorgarden #woodworking #scrollsaw #woodintarsia
Midpoint post on this new project. I’m building a Midpoint post on this new project. I’m building a “Little Free Seed Library” for our front yard, now that I’ve got at least a couple dozen native plants producing tons of seeds. I decided to make an intarsia for each side of the box: black-eyed Susan’s on one side and a leafcutter bee amongst swamp milkweed on the other. But being an outdoor, and possibly temporary decoration, unlike most proper intarsias, these are made of only cheap fence slat cedar and will be painted. Did I need to make each side consist of ~300 #scrollsaw cut pieces? Absolutely not. But hey, it’s fun and will be unique! These shots are of just the raw cut pieces, unglued and unshaped. The box itself is scrap ply from when I built our shed, and even the plexiglass front was an almost perfectly sized scrap I’d been hoarding for years. The door handle is the zebra swallowtail I originally made to adorn a front yard sign about that time the first one was seen reproducing in Pittsburgh since the 1930s. … #seedlibrary #gardendecor #nativeplants #woodworking #intarsia
I designed this as a T-shirt for myself for shits I designed this as a T-shirt for myself for shits and giggles. It’s based on a much simpler design I made a decade ago as custom yoga pants for @tam_a_ryn. lol. In the unlikely event that anyone is like ”ooh that’s rad I want one”, the Zazzle link is currently in my stories. Or just DM and I’ll send a link. Yes I will make like $4 or something. But I obviously didn’t design it to sell. No AI! … #birdnerd #tshirt #birds #birdart
This is a moth called “Stiria brava” (a member of This is a moth called “Stiria brava” (a member of the owlet moth family, Noctuidae), which was discovered around the Rio Grande in Texas, and first described in the science literature by my friend Dr. Kevin Keegan*. Kevin is the Manager of Invertebrate Zoology Collections at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH), and he played a big role in the whole “first known zebra swallowtail reproduction in PGH in almost a century” thing that unexpectedly happened in our backyard last summer (he had pulled the last known specimen from 1937 in the CMNH collection). Because of this, and because of the constant entertainment he provides in our local naturalist chat group, and because he’s just a genuinely good dude, I decided to take on this very rare commission. This piece took literally 6 months to finish from design to build mostly due to real job responsibilities and lack of shop time. I took some artistic liberties to keep it within my goal of being a completely all natural wood color intarsia. But I think it turned out pretty nice, and he seemed to love it. Built from: Yellowheart (Euxylophora paraensis; 2 trees: normal and spalted), Black walnut (Juglans nigra; 2 trees with varied coloration), Elm (Ulmus sp.), Brazilian walnut (Ocotea porosa), American holly (Ilex opaca; 2 trees: regular and spalted), white ash (Fraxinus americana), wenge (Millettia laurentii), lauan plywood (Shorea sp.), and tulip tree plywood (Liriodendron tulipifera). *A Preliminary Molecular Phylogeny for Stiria (Noctuidae, Stiriinae) and Description of a New Species from Texas. Kevin L. Keegan, David L. Wagner. The J. of the Lepidopterists’ Society, 76(3):175-182 (2022). … #woodworking #scrollsaw #moth #lepidoptera
There’s a little crabapple tree basically in the d There’s a little crabapple tree basically in the ditch on our street. Every few years it has a mast year. I decided to brew up a tiny batch of simple mulled cider, which I’ve done from this tree before. I added a handful of our American beautyberries I grabbed on a whim as I walked by them, boiled, mashed, strained through a cheesecloth, added a little maple syrup, and some sticks of cinnamon. Very slightly more astringent than last time - they could have ripened a bit more. And I don’t feel like de-stemming a few hundred tiny crabapples, which I’m sure added some tannins. Still delicious! @tam_a_ryn loved it, so good enough for me!
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