February Update
New soil life artwork, a very rare ciliate, and a bonus for paid subscribers!
Welcome to the February update!
I hope your 2024 has been off to a good start so far. We’ve had a very wintery winter here in Drangedal, with loads of snow and a cold snap that froze our kitchen pipes for almost a week. Thank goodness the bathroom still worked!
Here’s what’s new since the last update:
In mid-January I wrote a post investigating generative AI and testing whether it can replace me as an artist. I shared this post on Instagram but didn’t send it as an email, so if you missed it, you can see it here or click on the image above.
Worrying about AI has definitely interfered with my creativity over the last year or so as the technology has improved disturbingly fast. With that on top of the issues with social media, I lost motivation for a while. It felt like there was no future and no point in doing my work anymore. Writing that post helped me gain a much better understanding of how AI art works, how it’s made, and what it’s actually good for. After confronting it, and getting some space from Instagram, I feel so much better and my creative drive is starting to recover.
New Artwork: The Soil Factory
In the December update I shared a work in progress featuring fungi weaving soil together. I was happy with it, but unfortunately hit a mental block where I couldn’t decide how to proceed, and decided to start a fresh piece instead. Unfortunate, but it happens sometimes.
For this new one I decided to push my comfort zone and try to draw a brighter scene with more saturated colours. I think it works, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t craving to go back to the safer, more muted (but maybe boring) tones that I’m used to!
In soil, long strands of fungal hyphae link the ecosystem together like tiny pipes, so I used this as an opportunity to practice working with perspective. I wanted to show the hyphae traveling far away into the distance, but also wanted this scene to take place in the rhizosphere (the area around a plant’s roots), since that’s where much of the microbial activity in soil is concentrated. That’s why you can see root hairs, but not the root itself. You can think of it as if you’re standing on or next to the root, looking out away from it.
Since scale and perspective in the micro-world aren’t always intuitive to understand, here’s a diagram with a microscope photo of a plant root with root hairs to hopefully make better sense of the view:
The darker area along the bottom of the photo is the plant’s root, which is not visible in the drawing since it’s behind you. Those clear tubes in the photo are root hairs, which are the big grayish-translucent shapes on the left side of the drawing. So, if you were standing in a similar position in the drawing, you would have your back to the root and be looking out across a gap between clusters of soil particles, and that big fungal strand (which is not in the microscope photo), would be passing near your left shoulder.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s what in this chaotic scene:
The amoeba, ciliate, and flagellate are all different kinds of protozoa. They each selectively hunt different types of bacteria and other microorganisms, releasing a diverse range of nutrients in plant-available forms while also providing a lot of other benefits to plants and the ecosystem as a whole.
You can see lots of bacteria scattered throughout the drawing. Some are swimming, some are clustered and starting to build biofilms on the surfaces of the root hairs, soil particles, and even the fungi. As they go about their business, bacteria and fungi bind tiny particles of mineral and organic materials together and are largely responsible for turning loose debris into what we consider healthy soil.
Some of the bacteria are actually inside the root hairs too. Check out this video I took of living root hairs in the microscope:
You can see the jelly-like cytoplasm streaming through them, carrying nutrients and other substances to and from the root. Some of the tiny particles you can see inside the root hairs are bacteria, possibly taking part in the rhizophagy cycle. Some of the bacteria are swimming around and sticking to the outside of the root hairs too, along with some small protozoa hunting them.
I’m not sure why it’s so amazing to me that bacteria can actually be seen inside plant cells with just a normal microscope. By now most of us are aware that our own bodies are full of diverse bacteria and that a healthy microbiome is very important to our well-being. We also know that at least some of those bacteria enter our systems via the plants we eat, so of course plants are full of bacteria too. Bacteria rule the living world. There’s just something about actually seeing systems like this in action that makes it all feel more real, and not just a concept.
Back to the drawing, the fungi are of course the long orange-brown thread-like structures winding throughout the scene. Here are some examples of how fungal hyphae can look in the microscope:
Also notice the big clumps of soil in those photos. These are aggregates, or clusters of soil particles bound together by bacteria and fungi. I won’t go into all the details here because that’s an enormous topic, but those clusters are the foundation of a healthy soil ecosystem, and a good indicator of the soil’s condition.
Here’s an example of soil that has been disturbed by agricultural machinery and chemicals, next to soil from a backyard garden just some meters away. I probably don’t need to tell you which one is which…
There is so much more to say on this topic but I’ll leave it here for now, and maybe write a blog post or several about this later on.
I hope you like the new drawing! Prints are available in my shop:
I also added the labeled version, which is only available as a poster.
Free for use in schools:
If you’re a student or teacher wanting to use this in a lesson or presentation, you’re welcome to take screenshots and use them, or just save them from here if it will let you. That should be good enough for slides, but if you do need higher resolution just reach out and I’ll send you whatever you need. I appreciate if you include my name with it, eg. ‘Artwork by K. Solbakk’. There’s no need to ask permission for this, but I love knowing that my work is useful and hearing how it’s being used, so please do let me know about it!
If you’re a teacher and you want to hang this up in your classroom but don’t have the budget to order art prints, please send me an email at post@mikroliv.no and we’ll work something out.
Other uses:
For other purposes such as in books or other commercial use please email post@mikroliv.no to discuss licensing options.
Also, please feel free to share this or any of my other work around social media, I hugely appreciate it! Just remember to tag me @protozoaprincess or link to my website, mikroliv.no if it’s on a platform I don’t use.
Phone Cases Discontinued from INPRNT
INPRNT has just announced that they will discontinue phone cases as of March 1st this year. It’s still possible to order them until then, but after that they will be removed from the site. I have no plans to find a new provider for these, so it’s now or never if you want to have one very unique case for your phone.
The cases can be found here, if you’re interested.
Exciting Research on Rare Ciliates
My good friend James and his professor Genoveva Esteban recently published a new research paper about rare ciliates, which included my drawing of the fantastically beautiful and extremely rare Dactylochlamys pisciformis, which was based on footage James recorded in his own microscope.
The paper is called Tracking Down the Rare Ciliate Biosphere, and you can read it here. Dactylochlamys was also featured in a Journey to the Microcosmos episode last year, “How to Not Kill an Extremely Rare Microbe”.
Blog vs Newsletter
As I mentioned earlier, I decided not to send the AI art post out as an email. I was somewhat conflicted about this, but concluded that it was more of a blog post and the emails are meant to be a newsletter.
Substack does have the option to add sections that you can sign up to separately, so if you do want every post as an email you could sign up to both, or you could just pick one of them. I’ll set that up if it feels necessary, but for now I think it works to just link to those posts in the newsletter.
New Bonus for Paid Subscribers: Colouring Pages!
I wasn’t initially planning to do this sort of thing, but I was honestly not prepared for how it would actually feel to get that kind of support. It truly means so much, and I want to offer just a little something more than my gratitude alone in return.
The high level of detail in the newest drawing really felt like it should be a colouring page, so I tried and I think it turned out really nice! I realized this could be just the thing to offer a small perk as a more tangible thank you to paid subscribers, without locking any of the newsletter content behind a paywall.
How it works:
Paid subscribers will now receive an upgraded version of the newsletter which includes a downloadable, printable PDF of one of my drawings as a colouring page. There will be two versions, one with high detail for longer, meditative colouring sessions, and a simpler one for kids or anyone else who doesn’t need that level of difficulty in a colouring page. Teachers are also welcome to print the pages and use them in the classroom.
I would love to see the finished colouring pages, so please feel free to send them to me, or post pictures on Instagram or Threads and tag me @protozoaprincess! I’ll share them and mention you in my Instagram stories and my next newsletter post, so do let me know if you’re shy and would like them to be for my eyes only :)
What’s Next
I’m busy working on a commission and a couple of collaborative projects, but can’t share details on any of that yet. Hopefully I’ll have news about those in the next update, which will likely be sometime in March or April.
I’m also working on adding a price list for commissions to my main website. That should make commission inquiries much easier and more comfortable on both ends, so I’m really looking forward to that!
That’s all for now! I’m really loving writing these updates and I hope you’re enjoying them too! If you have any feedback or comments to share you can reply to the email, write to post@mikroliv.no, or leave a comment on the Substack page.
Thank you so much for reading!
All the best,
Kate
What a beautiful video of the root hairs. thank you for sharing.