vanesa

[vanesa]

I might be a little biased but I’m honestly starting to believe that there’s no purer form of love than the defensive spite you see from biologists that have devoted their life to the study of a maligned or misunderstood species. For example:

The hyena biologist that arranged for Disney animators to come sketch captive  hyenas for The Lion King film (Laurence Frank) was so incensed when the animals were depicted as villains in the movie that he later included boycotting the film on a list of ways the average person could help hyena conservation.

Though it’s commonly known that Charles Darwin’s distaste for parasitic wasps played a role in his development of evolution theory (since he felt no loving God would create animals with such a disturbing life cycle), the biologists who study these wasps find it an unfair characterization. When they were tasked with coming up with a common name for the family of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) that old Charles so disliked, they proposed the name “Darwin Wasps” to spite the famous naturalist who had insulted their beloved family of insects.

Parasitologist Tommy Leung was so frustrated with the way people write about parasites to evoke horror and gore that he started writing a Parasite of the Day blog, that specifically avoids inflammatory or unsettling language to describe them. He also illustrates different species in colorful anime art on Twitter in a series called Parasite Monster Girls—which he calls his “love letter to parasites.”

I guess I’m just saying that if you’re a biologist studying an unpopular species and you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder about it you can always count on me to be in your corner if you want to get a little petty with the public!

#biology

[vanesa]

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

#accessibility #resource #alt text

[vanesa]

A little crow :) Thinking of doing a print run of this guy but I haven't decided yet.

#art #illustration #birds

[vanesa]

Hey everyone! I'm not usually one for begging for money on the internet. But my friend is doing a fundraiser for BPD treatment awareness , and research.

If anybody feels like throwing a donation in the pot I'd greatly appreciate it!

If you can't, even reblogging to help me get a bit more reach would be great!

Thanks all!

#signal boost #mental health

[vanesa]

Finished reading Math on Trial, which contained an intersection of two of my biggest interests: misapplied mathematics and fallacies, and forensic science failures.

Essentially, the book covers ways mathematics have been misapplied in courts and convicted or cast suspicion on innocent people. The book covers both criminal and civil cases. They also cover the original Ponzi scheme (which was actually named after someone named Charles Ponzi) and the origin of the phrase J'accuse!

The common problem is that mathematics is often misunderstood and probabilities are not calculated correctly. It is very easy for a non-expert to make an error in mathematical reasoning, and math models themselves may oversimplify a situation. It also serves to needlessly complicate trials. However, with DNA evidence and random match probabilities, mathematics has a place in the courtroom, and thus it is essential to understand math.

Forensic geneticists should have a strong foundational knowledge of statistics and be careful not to misapply them. DNA identification is based on random match probabilities and issues like highly degraded or mixed DNA samples or using "cold database hits" can lead to a wrongful conviction. (Although DNA technology has been rapidly developing to be more and more sensitive and use more loci for identification, lessening the chance of error.)

#personal #books

[vanesa]

Heyo it’s back to school time and here’s a research tip from your friendly neighborhood academic librarian.When searching for any topic on the internet just type in the word ‘libguide’ after your topic and tada like magic there will be several  beautifully curated lists of books, journals, articles, or other resources dealing with your subject. Librarians create these guides to help with folks’ informational needs, so please go find one and make a librarian happy today!!

#resource #research #library

[vanesa]

If this were closer to Greece I'd say they'd found Echidna's remains

#science #paleontology #animals

[vanesa]

EEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEE EEEEEEE

That's right! It's International Bat Appreciation Day! We share our planet with over 1400 species of bat, making the second most abundant mammal order, and they perform a wide variety of ecological roles, from dispersing seeds to pollinating flowers to eating thousands of insects in a single night! Over 200 bat species are listed as Threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature--that is over 14 percent of all bats!

YOU can help endangered bats today by donating to Pennsylvania Bat Rescue at this link. This PA-based organization rehabilitates sick or injured bats and helps educate people like you and me in how we can create more bat-friendly environments.

If you want to learn about particularly-cool bat species native to New Zealand, check out this Consider Nature article on the Pekapeka, the bat that walks:

For the rest of the day, Consider Nature will be bat-bombing Tumblr with some of our favorite bat species to share them with the world!

Alt text: a small brown bat stretching its wings with the kind of fabulous flourish that would impress Ryan Evans.

#animals #biology #conservation #bats #environment

[vanesa]

i watched one (1) video on how to draw hands that changed my life forever. like. i can suddenly draw hands again

these were all drawn without reference btw. i can just. Understand Hands now (for the most part, im sure theres definitely inaccuracies). im a little baffled

#art reference

[vanesa]

One of the best shot of Total Solar Eclipse from 08-04-2024.

Via @nasa-official

#ai

[vanesa]

Corvids

A set of stickers commissioned by the awesome @kyrjaa, who let me print and sell these in the future! Thank you again for this wonderful opportunity, I had so much fun with these <3

The set includes all corvids living in our part of Europe except for one - I need to draw Spotted nutcracker sometime as well :D

#birds #art #illustration

[vanesa]

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

#history

[vanesa]

Meet the shrimply stunning (and literally striking) mantis shrimp! This tiny yet dazzling marine crustacean defies conventional classification and breaks the mold in more ways than one.

Learn more!

#biology #marine life #mantis shrimp

[vanesa]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

#art #art reference

[vanesa]

Hearing them get so excited over the whale fall is so fun I love hearing people who are passionate about their work

#video #biology #marine life

[vanesa]

all these retro style games that are like "NO tutorials NO handholding" apparently forgot about the little books that used to come with your game that detailed all the mechanics, controls, special moves, lore, maps, collectables, means of unlocking additional content, character bios, etc

#read later #gaming #media #article

[vanesa]

made a really big poster about whale falls for uni this semester. enjoy

#scientific illustration #marine life