Art inspired by biology, created by a biologist
Commissioned as a graduation present for a Ph.D. student in Hawaii (notice the islands in the pond) studying the Oahu Amakihi honeycreeper (the bird – note the island it’s perched on) and the disease ecology of malaria (mosquito). Modeled & rendered in Blender 2.57. Post-processing and texture creation in GIMP. Textures based on photos taken by the student. See Dr. Krend with the artwork here.
A voracioius lionfish on the heels of a springbok in the African savannah.
This is the ninth in a series of pieces, “Ocean Invasion,” which finds ocean creatures living in absurd land habitats.
This piece was inspired by a marine biologist friend who is currently studying these invasive fish in Hawaii (Christie Wilcox of the popular “Science Sushi” blog at Discover Magazine).
Detail:
My artwork, “Out of Warranty,” has been featured in the latest issue of Blender Art Magazine, Issue #29, which had an “Industrial Revolution” theme.
The piece was inspired by both the industrial revolution and it’s eventual hand in the oil spill in the gulf.
You can download this issue (and all issues) as a free .pdf file HERE.
Alternatively, you can read the magazine in online format HERE.
Feuturing “Out of Warranty”
From August 2009 to August 2010 I worked as a post-doc in the lab of Dr. Veronica Hinman at Carnegie Mellon University. Basically, I studied the evolution of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Specifically, our lab focused on looking at GRNs in the context of development using the wonderful sea critters in the phylum Echinodermata. For those of you not in the know, the “spiny-skinned” echinoderms are the asteroids (starfish/sea stars), ophiuroids (brittle stars), echinoids (sea urchins), holothuroids (sea cucumbers), and crinoids (feather stars, sea lillies and such).
In celebration, I spent a fair bit of time getting back to my art roots creating the above cladogram in the sand of the Echinoderm phylum.
I spent a while trying to find time-lapses or animations of starfish development online, to no avail. Thus I spent a week of much needed downtime to create this computer animation using Blender: (note – you can also watch it in High Definition on youtube).
NOTE: The details of the actual metamorphosis of the rudiment into the juvenile are not accurate – it’s quite hard to animate these types of changes – and to be honest I had not actually seen these creatures in the flesh. But it’s good enough to get a good idea of how the whole developmental process occurs in this type of sea star.
Squid tend to their paper nest amidst the Spanish moss of a southern bayou.
This is the eighth in a series of pieces, “Ocean Invasion,” which finds ocean creatures living in absurd land habitats.