Inktober sketch #3: exhausted scribbles
A couple of scribbly winged trilobites.
Uh-oh, these #inktober sketches are tumbling downhill. Maybe less drawing at 1 in the morning after a long day.
Inktober sketch #2
Some messy, late-night trilobites swimming through the air above a Jack O'Lantern.
Blending a little #sciart with Hallowe'en every day this month.
It's Inktober!
Inktober is here! That spooky month where illustrators flit about Twitter with smudgy fingers, eschewing ctrl-z and abstaining from erasable pencils. Ink! Messy, permanent, committed.
I've gone deep into my art cabinet and excavated my late grandmother's ink nibs and fountain pens. I think I'll go with a "prehistoric creatures with jack o'lanterns" theme for the month. Find all my sketches here on The Flying Trilobite blog, or on Twitter @FlyingTrilobite.
If you want more artists in your Twitter feed, or on Instagram, just check the #inktober hashtag.
Cyborg Sea Anemone
Cyborg Sea Anemone © Glendon Mellow 2017, Shareable under (CC BY-NC 3.0)
This morning's sketch. Just a Cyborg Sea Anemone trundling along on the ocean floor in search of food. When coral reefs die you gotta go where the food is at and give up on the sessile lifestyle.
Desperate times, man, desperate times.
Might paint this one in ArtRage later.
It Begins
When I started my new full time job at Combustion Training earlier this summer, I treated myself to a new Moleskine sketchbook. if there's one thing I've realized, it can be hard for m to create when I'm worried about job hunting and paying the bills.
Time to start drawing and sketching daily again! Woke up at 6:30 today and scribbled this out.
Pop Avimimus
Pop Avimimus, Glendon Mellow 2017.
Playing with photo app filters late at night again. I blame art director-photographer Liam Wong for the colour inspiration.
The original illustration was a pencil drawing painted on my iPhone:
A Definition of Covfefe
One more entry into last night's meme-fest on the US President's bizarrely unfinished, long-published typo:
A Decade: The Flying Trilobite blog turns 10 today
As of today, The Flying Trilobite blog celebrates 10 years of surreal scientific illustration!
Please enjoy this embarrassing throwback blog banner.
*shiver* there's a decent painting hidden somewhere under lens flare and Trebuchet.
My sincere thanks to everyone who has popped in and out of my fine art, science communication, social media, and blog writing career so far. It's been appropriately filled with unexpected art and work opportunities, and even more surprising and wonderful friendships. And most of all, thanks to my wife Michelle who has been so supportive of my strange career path.
The majority of the posts on this blog were written in the hours before dawn, and every time I sat down to sketch, or paint, or blog before I went off to whatever job I had at the time, I was a little more buoyant for the rest of the day. A little stronger, and my mind ticking a little faster. Looking forward to what was next.
I'll never regret getting a bat-winged trilobite tattoo on my arm, because this blog marks about a quarter of my life now. And I'm not stopping. Although it may seem like I blog less often, in reality it's even more, just in more places. I owe it all to carving out this space for myself and for others to step into.
THERE WILL BE A CONTEST TO MARK THIS MOMENTOUS OCCASION LATER THIS MONTH AND YOU CAN WIN SOME ORIGINAL ART. It will probably contain a fossil that is not scientifically sound.
Busy Days Ahead
Some busy days ahead!
The 3rd Annual #SciArt Tweet Storm starts on March 1st! A whole week of hundreds of artists tweeting art inspired by science with the #SciArt hashtag. The Symbiartic crew (Kalliopi Monoyios, Katie McKissick, and myself) will be retweeting a ton of them from the @Symbiartic account.
In addition, something I'm super excited about: the new symbiartic.com will be launching several hours after I post this. Check it out for some more news. We're launching something I hope will be a huge help to science communication - editors, bloggers, journalists, and of course artists or call kinds; cartoonists, fine artists, scientific illustrators, bioartists and more. Don't miss it.
On a more personal note, I am working on a portrait for a scientist (and friend!) I admire. More on that pretty soon.
AND! This here purty ol' Flying Trilobite blog turns 10 years old on the tail end of the #SciArt Tweet Storm! Watch for a contest announcement and a chance to win an original painting.
(Gotta get started making the painting you can win! Add that to my to-do list...)
When searching for full-time work, it can be a challenge to remember what drives you forward. In my case, every career advancement I've had in the past 10 years, from speaking engagements, to professional writing, to social media management, stems from sharing my art on The Flying Trilobite blog, and experimenting with ways to build the sciart community. I'll have more to say on the actual blogiversary, but for now, thank you to everyone who encourages my work. Professionally I'm in a tough transition right now, and your support means an incredible amount to me.