The Emphasis of Scientific Illustration
Science is a fundamentally visual endeavour. Its aim is to explain and clarify, therefore, when communicating research, a combination of image and text to share discoveries, ideas and observations is fundamental.
The ability to emphasise and isolate important details make illustrations invaluable for exchanging and clarifying thoughts, messages or information in any scientific field.
When you open a science textbook or magazine, it’s often the images that capture your attention. Some of these images help you visualise the topics, while others - such as diagrams - can be instrumental in helping us understand difficult concepts.
Recent generations are accustomed to having easy and free access to high-quality photographic representations. Despite this, the minute details and differentiations that are found in scientific illustrations are essential when differentiating between species and concepts.
Creating scientific illustrations can require collaborations between scientists and illustrators. Sometimes they require an illustrator with specific skills or training, such as a natural history or scientific illustrator.
What is Scientific Illustration?
Scientific illustration can be defined as a discipline in which a bridge between art and science is built. It is considered as an artistic-scientific discipline in the service of scientific communication: an activity carried out to help clarify, simplify and objectify certain concepts.
It can play a vital role in conveying information from any realm of science, from archaeology to astronomy, botany to cartography, zoology to molecular biology, and many others.
Scientific illustration could be mistaken for natural art or even hyper-realism but it is not the same. In this discipline, there is no room for subjectivity, as it has to serve the purpose of science communication. It must instead objectively and accurately represent the subject, which can be an animal, a plant, an object, complex processes, diagrams or any other element that requires a graphic representation.
That is why the precision with which the shapes, scale, colour, texture, and the elements that compound the subject are fundamental. A good scientific illustration would be the one that manages to fuse the requirements and scientific needs in an image with technical virtuosity and artistic interpretation. Due to this, many people consider that this discipline can not exist without being supervised by the scientific field.
Oyster Mushroom Beetle, by Sarah Jane Humphrey
A Brief History
The origins of scientific illustration can be traced far back through history. For thousands of years, illustrations have been used to depict observations and inform others. During the pharaonic period in Egypt, paintings were not only important as religious and political propaganda, but also as a way to educate people in fields as diverse as social behaviour, accounting, and resource management. Furthermore, some early “medical illustrations” date back to nearly 400 BC, when they were created on individual sheets of papyrus and were used for instructional purposes to depict anatomy, rudimentary “surgery” and medicinal plants.
Early scientific illustration was the primary way to capture images of newly discovered animal species, to show internal human anatomy, or to create an index of plant or animal species. This was necessary before the imaging capabilities of the modern were invented.
We saw more accurate scientific illustrations emerging from the 17th century. Scientists rushed to draw the first images of the internal structure of the human body, which helped to communicate new discoveries to students and researchers.
A “golden age” of scientific illustration throughout the 18th century sparked curiosity, exploration and experimentation with the natural world and were marked by great explorations. Many of these expeditions were accompanied by artists to document the strange shapes of the exotic flora and fauna encountered on their way, and to share these discoveries with society on their return.
One of the most famous naturalists and explorers, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), amazed the scientific world with his observations on biogeography. His essays were filled with maps and illustrations such as his famous Naturgemälde; illustrations of mountains showing changes in plant distribution according to altitude, which made him a pioneer in using infographics to present this kind of data visually (2). Humboldt’s work inspired generations of naturalists and scientists including Charles Darwin, who spent five years circumnavigating the world on board HMS Beagle.
Natural and scientific illustration kept developing and became increasingly popular in the 19th century, when some of the most luxurious natural history books in the UK were published, mainly focussing on birds and plants.
Examples of where you may see Scientific Illustration
One of the most popular types of scientific artwork is medical illustration. This can include artwork, illustrations, and animations depicting surgical procedures, internal anatomy, or biological processes that are too small to see, even through microscopes.
In physics and chemistry, the use of diagrams, schemes and abstract representations of phenomena that cannot be seen by the human eye are very common. We can find examples of these different techniques in museum displays, schoolbooks, and scientific publications.
Other common examples of where you can expect to find scientific illustration include natural history illustrations and models, which includes artwork relating to animals, plants, and fungi in their environment, reconstruction or illustration of extinct species such as in palaeontology, and infographics and data visualisation, where the artwork is very functional, and can be highly data and information driven.
Artwork depicting botanical subjects and the different anatomy of these plants is another popular area within natural history illustrations. Due to the large number of plant species and new discoveries, there is an ongoing amount of subjects to render.
Most recently, in 2020, the world saw the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Representations of virus SARS-CoV-2 were shown in specialised and general media countless times, through drawings, 3D images or animated models.
The Practice of Scientific Illustration
Scientific illustration has been the beautiful match between art and science for centuries. Even today, scientific illustrators compose accurate depictions of nature, medicine and basic scientific concepts through watercolour, acrylics, ink or oils. Not only should they appeal to the eye, but the work must also include the correct proportions, colours and anatomical structures.
Illustrators may watch living individuals, take pictures, make sketches from different angles and discuss important features with specialists before the final illustration is done. Plenty of rough sketches are made to get a feeling for the right size, positions and view of that animal or plant.
Illustrators take years to master their craft, be it drawing, painting, web design or video production.
Different subjects require different techniques and tools; any artistic technique can be used in scientific illustration, such as pencil, watercolours, or ink. Certain techniques the artist uses are stippling or cross-hatching and the surface either scraperboard or ink on Bristol board. These techniques and surfaces give the clean delicate lines required for the production of an accurate scientific illustration.
Digital software has recently transformed scientific illustration and communication, adding new levels of representation, special effects and shortening processing time.
Above all, science illustrators are storytellers. They take viewers to places usually invisible to the naked eye, from the microscopic world of molecules to distant galaxies. The visual continues to work as a foundation for making sense of data. The tools may have radically changed but the power of images has not.