Digital Nature
Wielding his computer’s stylus like a high-tech Creator, David Fierstein brings forth waters in a dry landscape. The lazy river he cuts through a forest does more than add scenery to his 3-D illustration: It divides two representations of forest fire management. On one side, dense underbrush built up after years of fire prevention allows a blaze to leap to the crowns of trees, spraying burning fuels across a fire line. On the other side, where controlled burns from previous years have eliminated the underbrush, fire is confined to the forest floor. To complete his pictorial explanation of why thick underbrush creates fires like those that ravaged the western United States last summer, Fierstein adds arrows to show the direction of convection, wind currents, and how fire progresses from one stage to another.
"It would be difficult to set up a photo shoot that would show all of these things happening in one shot," says Fierstein. "You can’t tell a photographer, ‘Just move that forest fire over a bit to the left, and that river a little bit to the right, please.’"
Scientific illustration’s strength is that it depicts rather than documents. Ann Caudle, director of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s scientific-illustration program, elaborates using a common seashell. "If ten illustrators accurately illustrate the same shell, there would be ten different, nuanced approaches, each meant to emphasize some particular aspect of the shell."
Illustration’s ability to manipulate and highlight the intricacies of nature makes it a powerful tool, especially for bringing to light some of the biggest health and environmental news stories.
When West Nile virus arrived in the United States in 1999, seven New Yorkers died, and infectious disease became front-page news. Some scientists posited that the virus’s spread was but one of global warming’s effects on infectious disease. To bring home the larger story, illustrator Bryan Christie created a world map showing disease outbreaks during the last El Niño, while a line diagram explained how mild winters and dry springs facilitated the spread of West Nile virus.
Some of the most important scientific stories take years to develop, and the illustrations that accompany them are no different. In the late 1980s, John D. Dawson was commissioned by National Geographic to create a series of illustrations on ants. "I spent a year researching ants and visiting the labs of Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson at Harvard, who had three colonies they were studying," says Dawson. "National Geographic bought me a microscope, and for the next year, I drew ants by the hours."
Two years after he began his research, Dawson’s illustrations were included in a landmark article and as part of Hölldobler and Wilson’s The Ants, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The definitive study of one of the most diverse animal groups on Earth, The Ants covers evolution, taxonomy, physiology, and ecology, and explains the insects’ complex social behavior.
Though rendering images from a microscope might seem to be the most painstaking task, the job is just as demanding when illustrators look the world’s biggest creatures straight in the face. Artist Shawn Gould recently toiled for nine months to illustrate a new theory of whale evolution. His extensive research included a visit to a whale consultant in Ohio, and days spent sifting through the rows and rows of fossilized whale skulls in the basement of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The field’s demand for accuracy is equally daunting. "It’s a marriage of science and art in a way that’s elegant and informative," says Edward Bell, art director of Scientific American. "I want the illustration to be beautiful, but if it doesn’t deliver the information, it’s ultimately a failure."
Delivering that accuracy is a reason many scientific illustrators focus on a single discipline, and follow their field of interest as assiduously as the scientists themselves. "They already know what DNA is, what the ulna is, which are the inner moons of Saturn," Bell says. "That eliminates potentially dangerous errors from being introduced."
While many scientific illustrators are well informed, they don’t claim to be scientists. "I’m attracted to the parallels of art and science, how both are trying to explain the unexplainable," says Bryan Christie. "But I’m an artist first." –Stephen R. Miller
