Jeff Zugale is a concept artist best known for his work on video games like BioShock: The Collection and Evolve. He draws spaceships for a living, and I thought maybe we could talk about that. I figured you probably think that’s as cool as I do.
Continue reading “Every Spacer Poops: an Interview with Concept Artist Jeff Zugale”
Ashu, the Ibis of Dawn, lives in the marshes beside the river Shugal. Each morning, her wings embrace the sunrise that she might guide it across the sky, for the strong right eye of the river Shugal is blind, and may only open with her aid; if she is absent, the strong right eye will close and cast the city and its farms into darkness. Continue reading “Ashu, the Ibis of Dawn, Healer of the Sun”
Iridescence has evolved on Earth several times, as in the nacre of mollusc shells, the feathers of birds, and the shells of insects like beetles.
They all share a common structure: nanoscale molecules that refract different wavelengths of light depending on the angle that the light reflects.
It is very hard to draw.
Continue reading “Iridescence: Evolution’s Love Letter to Color”
Work continues on my Girraffatitan project! I’m getting close to having to make one of these as a sculpture.
Many species of Springheel exist across Trappist 1.3’s continents. Each specializes attracting particular species of Testiflora females and catches them in flight as their primary, and sometimes sole, food source.
It turns out that the creature we’ve been calling “Brachiosaurus” — the one with the super-weird nostrils on top of its concave head — is not the same clade as every other one we’ve called Brachiosaurus for the last century. No, the one with the weird nostrils (not, as I was taught, for snorkeling as a submarine gargant, as it would have been unable to breathe with all that water pressure) is now called a Giraffatitan. Which is a pretty wonderful name.
Continue reading “The Giraffatitan, often called Brachiosaurus”
You can find me (Joshua A.C. Newman) at PAX East in the Tabletop area with my krewe, the Indie Bazaar in booth C-2613!
Arrival is a melancholy movie, very deliberately built out of paradoxes: fear commissions the operation of reason. Violence induces compassion. Visitors arrive without traveling. Hope exists in the sure knowledge of tragedy. Being a piece of art, it expresses these paradoxes with particular symbols, from the lexical to the musical to the visual idiom that we’re used to in the movies around us. And being a piece of science fiction, it’s concerned with the world of the creators far more than with the world of the fiction, which serves as an extended metaphor for the human experience.
We have a really exciting opportunity to speculate the crap out of things right now! NASA just announced that not only did it find a solar system, Trappist 1, with seven terrestrial planets, but three of them are in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist!
Continue reading “Finding the Boundary Between Plant and Animal”
This is the first of a series working up to a complete illustration. This is me, coming to understand the basics of brachiosaur physiology.
