An art blog less about process and theory, and more of a portfolio for me to dump my nonsense. Updates M, W, F, or whenever I feel like it.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Ants are cool

Here's a big ol' post which includes several drawings completed during my 2 week trip to Borneo. If you're curious about the trip itself I can show you photos, but this isn't the proper forum for that seeing as I didn't take any of the photos.
Over the 2 weeks we got to know and appreciate the 13 professional myrmecologists teaching us about ants, and some of the students decided to put together a thank you presentation. Someone launched the idea of making a key to the instructors, the way one makes a dichotomous key to identify organisms. For those of you who aren't familiar, a dichotomous key is something like:

1 :  specimen has 11 antennal segments . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1': specimen has 12 antennal segments . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 : specimen has wrinkly buttocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2': specimen does not have wrinkly buttocks . . . . . . . Franklin

3:  . . . .etc.

It's like a chose your own adventure of knowledge.
We put together a slide show splitting out the professors according to gender, physical attributes like hair color, and also according to character and things that made them memorable. It was our chance to give thanks, but also poke fun at them in a sensible way. In order to complement the species descriptions, I made the following caricatures of the instructors:
I made them all a bit smaller so that this post wouldn't be horribly long; so please click on them and look at them at full size!

1 comment:

  1. The drawings were FABULOUS Theo. The presentation wouldn't have been anywhere near as fun without them. You are one talented man!
    Liz

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