In my previous blog posts, I mentioned that I was a student in Digital Media, and that I obtained my associate's for that. I also mentioned that I am now pursuing a degree in biology. These two fields seem completely unrelated. Well, truth is, they are not.

Now, one term you may be familiar with if you read a lot of science news is "scientific discovery." Yeah, it is really cool when some scientist somewhere comes across something--experimental measurements, a new organism, what have you--that has formerly been unknown to science and has useful implications. Scientists are always crawling all over each other trying to find the next one.

Just one problem with this. You can come up with the most useful thing ever to humanity, but what good is it if nobody understands what you are talking about? That is where art comes in.

Want to try me? Okay. I will give you a description of an animal. Waptia is a fossil crustacean from the Burgess Shale. It had a bivalved carapace covering much of its body; at the front, two eyes and antennae emerged. Its first four pairs of legs consisted of only a walking branch, whereas the latter six pairs had gill branches for breathing. Protruding from the back was an abdomen consisting of five segments, followed by a caudal furca (tail fork).

This is a sketch of Waptia. That description makes a lot more sense after looking at the picture, I bet. It does not cover every feature, but it is consistent with the description I gave. And if you cheated and skipped the description to look at the link, I hardly need to go any farther on this.

So, why not just show you the picture in the first place? Well, aside from demonstrating how much easier it is to look at a picture than to get the description, there is something important to note here. Yes, the picture shows most of the things in the description, but the description also has merit. Had I just shown you the picture, you might have seen a shrimp; however, Waptia is not a shrimp. It lived over 500 million years ago and has important anatomical differences that make it close to but not a shrimp. The point there is, yes, art is important to understanding some science literature completely, but it is not a total substitute for the original material.

Why even bring that up, then, if it is going to go both ways on the argument? Because it is difficult to be a scientific artist if you do not understand the science that you are trying to represent! There is a lot of jargon in science that takes more than a little initiation to reliably interpret. In order to be a translator, you have to understand both languages, and the same goes for turning science into art.

Paleontology is a perfect example. If you look at fossils of Waptia, it looks kinda like the pictures, but there are differences. Fossils have been distorted because the animals were crushed under tons of rock for millions of years. Scientists have to interpret the conditions of preservation and decide whether the fossil is a faithful preservation or if it is imperfect. Chances are that it is far from perfect. Plus, lots of animals did not leave behind soft tissues, so we have to guess what they were like, in most cases using faint clues like sites of muscle attachments that an artist untrained in scientific skills would probably miss.

Basically, scientists figure out the cool things and then give artists descriptions that they can use to produce representations of the things they discovered. In paleontology, an interpretation of what an animal was probably like in life is called a reconstruction. However, most scientific figures are this way; they represent the phenomenon that they are meant to show, but are subject to interpretation in their production.

One more thing: What does this have to do with me as a member of ZHP, making games? Truth is, science has always influenced me artistically, as well. When I first started writing, my style was probably closer to scientific documents than standard fantasy. I also love to base art on scientific phenomena and fossil animals. You have been warned!