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August 4, 1997

Guild of Natural Science Illustrators to hold annual meeting at UCSC

California red-legged frog
Illustration by Randy Schmieder

By Robert Irion

Visit a science museum, scan a textbook, or read any science magazine, and you'll see it: scientific illustration, an art that both enhances and explains the often complex topics at hand. It's a growing field, and UCSC--thanks to the internationally renowned illustration track of its Science Communication Program--plays a key role in training the illustrators of today and tomorrow.

As evidence of its stature, the Science Communication Program will host this year's meeting of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, a worldwide organization with some 1,100 members. The meeting, open to registrants only, takes place on campus the week of August 11.

Attendees will hear talks by some of the world's best-known illustrators, including a keynote address by Chris Sloan, art director of National Geographic. Hands-on workshops will cover a wide variety of techniques, from traditional watercolor, pen and ink, and scratchboard to the booming business of World Wide Web pages and computer art tools.

The meeting's activities and speakers will showcase the rich variety of professional niches for the trained scientific illustrator. According to lecturer Ann Caudle, director of UCSC's program in science illustration, opportunities exist to work for scientific journals, popular and specialized magazines, newspapers and wire services, trade book and textbook publishers, museums, aquariums, zoos, botanical gardens, and multimedia companies.

"The field of scientific illustration is as diverse as nature," Caudle said, noting that illustrators often specialize in disciplines such as botany, entomology, medicine, archaeology, or astronomy. "The common denominator is accurate depiction of the modern world."

Caudle supplied a fascinating laundry list of some recent projects that reveal the breadth and constant challenge of the field: illustrating how crows use tools, cataloguing mosquitos in Brazil, creating the first accurate overhead model of the Grand Canyon, making a museum model of a tidepool so large that sand grains are the size of beach balls, animating the flow of blood with a computer, animating the dynamics of an accident for police, and visualizing landscapes beyond our solar system.

Guests at the meeting also will go on several field trips to see fine examples of illustration and gain inspiration from the region's natural beauty. Planned are visits to the UCSC Arboretum, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Elkhorn Slough, and the Big Sur Ornithology Lab.

The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators was founded in 1968 by a handful of illustrators at the Smithsonian Institution to promote professionalism in the industry. Today's members hail from every state and from countries such as Russia, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Argentina, and Zimbabwe. Santa Cruz is playing host to the group for the first time.

The public may view outstanding examples of the guild's work at an ongoing exhibit at the McPherson Center Museum of Art and History, 705 Front Street in downtown Santa Cruz. The exhibit, "Illuminating Science: The 29th Annual Exhibition of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators," runs through September 28.


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