SPOTLIGHT
Drawing on Science: A Peek into the World of Scientific Illustration

By Raphael Rosen, contributor

Somewhere in the United States an artist is picking up pencils and paper and walking into a hospital operating room. Instead of creating gesture drawings or painting a landscape, this artist is looking over the shoulder of a thoracic surgeon, taking notes and making sketches that will become an image in a medical textbook or a slide in a physician’s conference presentation. Still lifes and naked models? Think instead of scalpels, clamps, and human organs. Welcome to the world of the science illustrator.

In this world, the paintbrush is just as important as the microscope. Science illustration encompasses not just medicine, but paleontology, geology, biology, zoology, astronomy, and anatomy. Almost all of the various scientific subfields need professionals who can communicate the nub of their discoveries in a visual way. 

And from the looks of the numbers and activity of science illustrators, the state of science illustration looks healthy. Peruse the website of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI), a group founded in 1968, and you’ll notice that it has chapters in Illinois, New England, California, upstate New York, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, the Great Lakes, Washington, D.C., and has recently expanded across the Atlantic into Portugal. The group sponsors an annual conference as well, with a list of activities that would make any SciArt aficionado drool. For instance, last year’s conference - held in Bar Harbor, ME - featured a tantalizing slate of classes including “Painting Small Mammals,” “Floral Morphology,” “How to Make Realistic-Looking Three-Dimensional Plant Models,” “Preserving Specimens in Resin,” “Sculpting Insects in Polymer and Wire,” and “How to Paint a Kick-Ass Radish.” One workshop in the 2012 conference taught participants the ins and outs of creature design, teaching illustrators how to combine “zoological and paleontological illustration.” The GNSI also publishes a quarterly journal, as well as sponsoring educational workshops; last year’s workshop in Ames, IA focused on depicting slipper orchids in watercolor. ​

"Human Immunodeficiency Virus" by Alexey Kashpersky © 2013. This cosmic-looking image of the HIV virus was created using a three- dimensional molecular modeling program called cellP ACK and Cinema 4D. It won first prize in an international contest sponsored by CGSociety.

Another professional science illustration organization - the Association of Medical Illustrators - ​is even older. Established in 1945, the AMI now has over 800 members on four continents. Its members share information about how to draw up contracts, set fees, use Adobe Photoshop, and create different effects using pen and ink. According to their website, the AMI tries to be “key partners in the process of scientific discovery, knowledge transfer, and innovation, and to be recognized as the premier global resource for promoting the power of visual media to advance science education, communication, research, and understanding.”

Who are these illustrators? Where do they come from? And, if we were to go on a field expedition, where would we find one? Most, it seems, find their way into the career by accident. One of these is Birck Cox, a freelance illustrator based in Philadelphia who has been in the field for over 30 years. While working in a Portland, OR hospital as a computer programmer, he learned that his boss was publishing a research paper and needed illustrations. Though he didn’t have a formal art background, Cox volunteered, and after completing a sample illustration was told that he should “do the rest of it.” Hooked, Cox bought medical textbooks, took classes, and eventually enrolled in a graduate illustration program at the Medical College of Georgia. 

​Or take Kalliopi Monoyios, a Chicago-based freelance illustrator. After getting a bachelor’s degree in geology at Princeton, Monoyios took a position as a lab technician in the lab of Neil Shubin, a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. Originally hired to help prepare fossils, Monoyios found that the work wasn’t what she had expected. “It was hard on the body,” she said, “and I learned that it wasn’t for me.” Her interests leaned toward illustration, and after she studied with another University of Chicago science illustrator, Shubin let her start providing illustrations for his work, including an evolutionary biology book titled Your Inner Fish. She hasn’t looked back.

Published in: Huang J. et al. 2006. "Vascular inflammation in stroke and focal cerebral ischemia." Surgical Neurology 66:232-245. © Johns Hopkins University-Ian Suk. Image courtesy of artist.

What about the science illustrator’s typical habitat? Besides their own homes - many illustrators freelance - illustrators can be found in universities, museums, and at both print and online publications. Medical illustrators work at universities, too, but also at hospitals, and frequently are part of legal teams that deal with medical malpractice. In general, medical illustrators work “any place where complex health and science concepts need to be explained to the public,” says Tonya Hines, the current president of the AMI. They also sometimes work directly for a physician if, say, a surgeon needs help communicating a concept at an upcoming lecture. Gary Lees, chairman of Johns Hopkins’ Department of Art as Applied to Medicine (founded in 1911), adds that illustrators work for pharmaceutical companies, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian, and various science journals and magazines. 

The role of the medical illustrator in a hospital is multifaceted, though, and goes far beyond creating captivating graphics for lectures. “The illustrator has become a partner in strategically communicating science,” says Lees. An illustrator is often part of a surgical team, documenting procedures as they occur so that future surgeons can learn proper technique. It’s critical that techniques be passed on as accurately as possible: if details are left out, or if surgeons don’t know exactly what to expect when they make particular cuts or move aside particular organs, the patient’s life could be in danger. The goal, in fact, is for someone to be able to follow along completely with the illustrations, says Hines, just as if they were following a recipe in a cookbook or following the pictogram instructions in an airplane safety pamphlet. “For surgeons,” says Hines, “knowing the surgical field is important. They have to have in their minds an anatomical roadmap of what they’re going to see as they operate, before the operation begins.”

But aside from surgery, is there truly a need for science illustrators? Can’t they be replaced by photographers? This is a question that science illustrators encounter often. “When you say what you do at a party,” says Jenny Keller, a coordinator of and an instructor at the California State University, Monterey Bay science illustration program, “someone always says ‘What’s that?’ And then, ‘why don’t you just take a photograph?’” Keller usually responds with a simple thought experiment: how would you create a photograph of a cutaway of a volcano? “Then people get it,” she says.

The volcano example is just one of many in a class of images that cannot easily be created using photography. Keller calls this class the “Special View Category.” What if, say, you wanted an image showing the parts of a plant both above and below the ground, roots and leaves and all? You could conceivably stage a scene in which you put a transparent panel in the ground next to a plant, but by the time you positioned everything the way you wanted it for your camera - ​lighting, soil distribution, plant shape - you might as well have hired an ​illustrator. Or consider an “artificially dense collection of species,” like the nature scenes sometimes used as panels of post office stamps. Or what if you wanted an image simultaneously showing the inside and outside of a Mayan pyramid? All of these are, according to Keller, “magical views that you can’t photograph.” 

By Jenny Keller, © Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation Comparison of otter (left) and human hair (right) distirbution. Image courtesy of artist.

The volcano example is just one of many in a class of images that cannot easily be created using photography. Keller calls this class the “Special View Category.” What if, say, you wanted an image showing the parts of a plant both above and below the ground, roots and leaves and all? You could conceivably stage a scene in which you put a transparent panel in the ground next to a plant, but by the time you positioned everything the way you wanted it for your camera - lighting, soil distribution, plant shape - you might as well have hired an illustrator. Or consider an “artificially dense collection of species,” like the nature scenes sometimes used as panels of post office stamps. Or what if you wanted an image simultaneously showing the inside and outside of a Mayan pyramid? All of these are, according to Keller, “magical views that you can’t photograph.” 

Photographs are also particularly bad at capturing processes. It would be immensely difficult to get a photograph of the water cycle, or of cell respiration. Illustrations, on the other hand, excel at this kind of task. Another way in which illustration exceeds photography, particularly in medicine, is the ability to weed out extraneous details. “There’s a good reason why you see an illustration, not a photo, of a lung in a doctor’s office,” says Glendon Mellow, a science illustrator based in Toronto who helps manage Symbiartic, a SciArt blog hosted on Scientific American’s website. “With a photo, you’d have too much visual noise. There’d be too much viscera and gore.”

Lots of visual information can also be distracting for paleontologists, says Monoyios. Illustrators can make the distractions vanish: they can eliminate cracks in fossils or make part of the surrounding rock fade out of view. “Illustrations can show you the actual structure, without superfluous details,” she says. 

Another class of images that can’t easily be captured using a camera is, in Keller’s lingo, the “Incorporating Everything” category. Unlike photographers, illustrators can create one condensed scene showing all of the life stages of a bird or insect, each in its appropriate habitat, engaging in its appropriate behavior. Illustrators can also create an “ideal representation” of a plant or animal, much like the ones found in field guides. These representations can include only the most important aspects of a bird’s appearance, the ones that can best help a birdwatcher identify what he’s seeing. If you rely on a photograph, you only get the characteristics of the particular bird that you happen to capture.

Science illustration can also depict things that we could never encounter in life. Dinosaurs, dodos, black holes: all of these could never be photographed. Only illustrations have the power to conjure images of the extinct, the impossible, the prehistoric. On the other hand, we have now entered the era of iPads and Google Glass, of nanobots and drones, of Siri and the internet of things. What hope do illustrators have in the never-ending advance of technology? In other words, won’t computers cause illustrators to go extinct?

Illustrators themselves feel they will always have a role in the communication of science. The role of the computer, they feel, has been misunderstood. “There’s a misperception that if an image is digital, the computer did it for you,” says Monoyios. In fact, creating a digital image requires a person, someone who has been trained to use the computer program appropriately and interpret scientific information accurately. In that way, a computer is no different from a pen: both are implements that artists can manipulate in whatever way they choose. Illustrators admit that the field is growing to include virtual reality and three-dimensional animation, especially in visualizing microscopic processes. But the ability to draw by hand is as important as ever. “We try to keep our students on the desk for as long as possible,” says Lees. “Better quality comes from starting on the [drawing] board. If a student starts on a computer, they lose their artistic confidence.” In fact, “they can do their thinking faster than paper.” 

​All of this good news doesn’t mean that, these days, freelance illustrators aren’t struggling. “The field is in an interesting transition,” says Monoyios. Former opportunities are disappearing, and since the print and electronic worlds continue to be in flux, illustrators are “scrambling to find their place.” To make it, she says, “you have to be a bit of a fighter and make your own path.” But the amount of science research is only increasing, and with that increase comes a greater need of people to communicate those findings. “There are probably more jobs for illustrators in general now than there ever have been before,” says Cox. And according to Cox, science illustration continues to be an attractive, and selective, career path. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” 

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