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Natural History Illustration

I'm currently doing a Bachelor of Natural History Illustration at the Uni of Newcastle. It's a surprisingly broad area of study, encompassing aspects of art, science and design. The main difference between studying Natural History Illustration and Fine Arts is the level of attention to detail, with Natural History Illustration focusing almost exclusively on the accurate depiction of nature. There is little to no conceptual or abstract art, as is seen in Fine Arts.

Just as a disclaimer, as much as this site is about what I've done at uni, everything I've written here is my own opinion. While I may paraphrase a lot of the information we've been told in our course, obviously nothing here strictly represents the attitude of the University of Newcastle's staff, or anyone in the industry.

Three major components of the course are scientific, studio, and field illustration. Click on the links to read more.

Scientific Illustration:

Scientific illustration is a very specific component of Natural History Illustration. It is done for a specific scientific purpose or paper, and needs to be extremely accurate. Scientific illustrations are commonly used in the study of taxonomy, anatomy, movement, behaviour and ecology.

These illustrations consist of the three I completed during a subject dedicated to scientific illustration at uni. An entomological illustration of a golden orb weaver spider, a botanical illustration of a bottlebrush cultivar, and a medical illustration of the muscular anatomy of the human neck.

I've dedicated a page to each of these illustrations, complete with lead-up work and a detailed explanation on the process involved in their completion. The links to these pages can be found on the Scientific Illustration page.



 Studio Illustration:

Studio illustration involves a lot more design than scientific or field illustration. It covers a broad range of areas, covering things like illustrations for books or magazines, designing posters, logos or concept art, and aesthetic art.

These studio illustrations are my answers to the briefs we were tasked with during our studio  subjects at uni. They include both practice pieces, as well as final works.



Field Illustration:

Field illustration requires going out into the field to observe and draw both plants and animals in their natural environment. While they can often be refined at a later time, field sketches are usually of a much lower quality than scientific or studio illustrations, as they need to be quick and supplies are limited by what can be taken into the field.

Despite this, field work is essential to the study and understanding of natural history. It provides illustrators with important observational information that can't be learnt in the studio.



In addition to these, the best way of describing what makes Natural History Illustration so different may in fact be by reiterating the first lesson we learned at uni.

My first core lecture at Newcastle was very interesting and summed up the basic mindset of natural history illustration quite nicely, and effectively, it's just a fairly simplistic understanding of the left and right sides of the brain. The two sides are said to represent two different 'focuses' within the brain, as you can see in an amazing illustration I found on the internet, here. As you can see, the left hand side of the brain is the 'logical' side, and it's the side that interprets and recognises symbols. Basically, it's the reason why we recognise a yellow circle surrounded by triangles as the sun, or a stick figure as a person. The right hand side of the brain, however, focuses more on the senses and observations. The right hand side is the side that records what you see and feel, which is what makes it so important to accurate drawing and illustration, an area that's usually dominated by the left side of the brain as you'll now know if you've ever had a stressful game of Pictionary...

In addition to this, we were asked to complete a couple of tasks, the first being to draw a quick sketch of our hand, which we quickly completed before the lecture began. Mine turned out like this.

After the lecture, we were told do draw a hand again, only this time, we were told not to look at the paper while we were drawing. Instead, we had to look at our other hand, observing it while we blindly drew on the paper. Naturally, having effectively drawn it blind, once this second drawing was completed, we started laughing when we saw what we'd ended up drawing. As you might expect, everyone's drawing was all out of proportion, lines didn't match up and everything just generally looked very crude, as you can see with mine, here.

The funny thing was, however, that the second drawing was actually much more successful than the first. While it lacked the proportion and refinement of the first, it captured a lot more of the information and detail that was to be seen. The 'blind' drawing actually forced people to draw what they saw, with the right side of the brain, and not what they thought it should look like, with the left. And as such, the lesson was learned.

You can read more about the course at the Bachelor of Natural History Illustration's page on the University of Newcastle's website.


Other pages to check out:

     

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