Bayheaded Tanagers, Baltimore Aquarium

I'm finally posting my finished posters for a project for the Baltimore Aquarium. The Baltimore Aquarium is developing a protocol to increase the success of captive breeding for bay-headed tanagers. My posters chronicle some of the important considerations.

Expect more bird images in the future! My thesis involves birds of prey!

BRAIINNNZZZZ! Stills from My First 3D Digital Medical Sculpture

 

For this course, I had to learn how to use a 3D sculpting program called ZBrush. It is incredibly cool, but also incredibly frustrating when you are learning as you are going; frustrating to the point of yelling at your computer as it crashes for the nth time! I have been picking up the basics, and some tricks, but there are still tons of buttons left to explore.

Random Projects From the Last Few Months

 

The challenging aspect of this project was that my specimen was so tiny, dry and brittle. My task was to dissect and draw the beetle. This was done under a dissecting scope. I obtained specimens from the Smithsonian's entomology collection, 3 that I could dissect and 3 that I had to return. Well of course I ended up accidentally snapping off a leg on a beetle that was supposed to be returned! Anyway, this beetle has a pretty cool defense system in place in the form of a hot, noxious, high powered spray that it can aim with master precision. Predators beware!

Watercolor course: Assignment: Plant Portrait. I selected this specimen from a box at the supermarket marked "Ginger". I later learned that this in fact was not ginger, but was most likely a Jerusalem Artichoke.

 

Okay, one is a Photoshop painting and one is a photograph. Guess which one! :P   The goal was to practice photoshop skills by doing photorealistic rendering of a biological tissue. I believe this image is of the gastric tissue of a pig. I'm not going to say how long it took, but suffice it to say, I did end up cropping it a lot.

 

More Photoshop painting. This piece shows the anastomoses between the Portal and Systemic systems of veins. 

 

An Illustrator piece depicting a first aid procedure.

Anatomical Sketches from Forever Ago!

Bisected head

Zees is a Beauchene skull, also known as an explodeeed skull. Eet
was created by zee French anatomeest, Claude Beauchene een zee
meed 1800s.

 Semilunar valves

Azygos Veins

La la la la!

These sketches are from last fall! The course was Anatomical Sketching. We had the amazing opportunity to draw from cadavers, people who have generously donated their bodies for science. The great thing about the course was that we had time to explore areas that were of interest to us. We have since used these sketches as references for other work.