December 2024
Announcing the giveaway winner, a new finished painting, mini paintings, and festive tardigrades.
Hi everyone! I have lots of updates to share with you today.
First of all, congratulations to Margaretha from Kvinesdal, Norway on winning the anniversary giveaway!
This was my first time holding an event like this and I was genuinely nervous that nobody would enter and I wouldn’t know what to do. Thankfully there were lots of entries, and it was so much fun to see my inbox fill up with “I love microbes!”.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated, and congratulations again Margaretha, I hope you enjoy the print!
New Finished Piece: Crashing Amoebas
After working steadily on commissions for most of this year, I’ve had a few weeks to take a little downtime and to work on some of my own projects.
I’m super excited to introduce my newest finished painting, the Crashing Amoebas!
I saw this happen in the microscope back in August and luckily managed to record the whole thing. I posted the video on Instagram:
I don’t know what exactly happened here, whether this was an attempted hunt gone wrong or just an accidental collision, but it was incredibly fascinating to watch.
Notice how differently the amoebas are shaped. We think of amoebas as just shapeless blobs, but their shapelessness is not random at all. These two have very different forms, one being flattened and fan-like and the other more rounded with thicker finger-like pseudopods.
In the video you can see the fan-shaped amoeba quickly tense up into a compact defensive blob that lets it move much faster and wrestle out of the other amoeba’s grasp. As soon as the danger is gone it spreads out into the fan shape again. I love watching this part. You can really see the tension melt away as it softens back into its relaxed form.
Whenever you feel tense this holiday season, take a deep breath and picture yourself as a melting amoeba while you exhale :)
I was so fascinated by this little encounter I wanted to try painting it. Many of my past works have showcased organisms just as they are without much of a story to them, and I’ve wanted to do more art with some sort of story or action happening. This was a perfect opportunity to try that. I also just love amoebas!
The challenge here was to make it clear that we’re looking at two cells colliding, not one big one. I couldn’t rely on colour differences since neither of them have any colour, so I focused on the shapes and textures along with lighting to indicate where one cell ends and the other begins.
I decided not to include background scenery this time, and let the amoebas have full focus with a simple black background. I thought it would be more striking this way, and I like how it turned out.
I hope you like it too!
Prints are available here via INPRNT:
If you happen to live in Norway, feel free to contact me directly about ordering prints so we can make arrangements with a local provider.
Mini Paintings as Works in Progress
I’ve started another new soil life illustration, which will be more realistic and in full colour. It was partially inspired by one of the early sketches for my most recent commission.
I was trying to work out how to show a bird and plant in the same scene as tiny microorganisms, and thought we could use a dramatic perspective so the larger organisms would appear far in the distance. We decided to take a different direction for that project, but I still like the concept and want to try it out.
I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be able to pull this off, to be honest. It will be tricky to make sure it reads as a close up perspective and not that the root is increasing in size. I have a few ideas about how to do it, but no guarantee it will actually work.
This is also going to be very detailed and will take a while to finish, but I thought of a way to share pieces of it along the way without revealing the whole work in progress and potentially losing motivation to finish it.
That last project included standalone line drawings of each organism which could be used outside the main illustration. I found that working on the individual elements separately made the overall project less overwhelming and helped me stay motivated through to the end.
I realized I could do this here too and create a series of simpler finished paintings while still making progress on the big one.
To show you what I mean, here’s the rough concept sketch again, but I’ve highlighted the section that I turned into a separate standalone piece:
After painting this in the main drawing I copied it onto a fresh canvas and finished it as its own piece.
Doing these separate mini paintings will slow down progress on the main piece, which will likely take several months, but I’ll end up with a bunch of bonus artwork to share along the way. It’ll also be cool to have the main drawing alongside all the mini ones; I can imagine their use in presentations to emphasize how nuanced the soil ecosystem is.
A Tardigrade Christmas
Our first snow came in November and inspired me to try making a playful microbe-inspired Christmas card. This is so different from my usual style, but my last commission gave me a little more confidence with it so I decided to give it a try. I had a lot of fun with this and I hope you like it too!
This is available in my print shop both as greeting cards and giclée prints. Unfortunately it’s already too late to order in time for this Christmas if you’re outside the US. The deadline for US standard shipping is today (Dec 6), and Dec 15 for expedited shipping.
And finally, as a little holiday gift from me, here’s a printable colouring page of the festive tardigrades that you can download:
You can colour it just for fun or make your own greeting cards for friends and family.
Hope you enjoy, and feel free to send me pictures of your artwork!
That’s all for now. I hope everyone has a safe and peaceful holiday season. Thank you again for being part of this beautiful community, and for making this such a wonderful first year on Substack.
I appreciate every one of you so much.
Wishing you all the very best,
Kate
Enjoy reading your newsletter. Thank you for the colouring page.