It’s been an eventful six months in my life, to say the least, and I realized I was way behind on art updates. June brought the wrap-up of classes at CSU Monterey Bay. The capstone of the in-person program in Monterey is the Illustrating Nature exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. When I began the program I remember telling the director that I had a hard time calling myself an “artist.” Well, nine months of intensive art training and producing more art than possibly ever before cured me of that problem! It was great to be able to display a couple of the works I created this past year while I was focused on learning as much as possible, alongside my extremely talented classmates. I highly recommend putting the next exhibit on your radar screen for May 2020—I know I will try to be there to see what next year’s class has created.

Over the summer I was thrilled to have two of my projects published—my first ever! The first was an infographic about eDNA I created for an article by UC Santa Cruz science writing student Rodrigo Perez Ortega, titled “A World in a Bottle of Water.” The article and infographic were printed by Knowable Magazine in August: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2019/environmental-dna-ocean-water

One of my illustrations I worked on in Jane Kim’s Zoological Illustration class was a project for The Nature Conservancy describing California species reliant on groundwater, for a guidebook for managers. This style of illustration, a “catalog” illustration, shows many species in a typical environment for representational purposes, but at a size and proximity you wouldn’t necessarily find in nature. The Critical Species Lookbook can be found here: https://groundwaterresourcehub.org/public/uploads/pdfs/Critical_Species_LookBook_web.pdf

I feel lucky that while a student I have been already able to get some of my artwork out in the world in service of better understanding nature.