Book Description

The Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration, Second Edition
Sponsored by the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and written by top illustrators, scientists, and industry experts, The Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration, Second Edition is an indispensable reference guide for anyone who produces, assigns, or simply appreciates scientific illustration.
Offering broad coverage and more than 620 outstanding illustrations, this new edition offers up-to-date coverage on all aspects of this specialized field, from illustrating molecules and 3D modeling to important material and advice on copyright and contractual concerns, as well as establishing a freelance business.
With step-by-step instructions, in-depth coverage of illustrative techniques and related tools, and helpful advice on the day-to-day business of scientific illustrating, it is easy to see why scientific illustrators refer to this book as their "bible." ... Read more

Reviews (4)

The definitive reference for scientific illustration
Since its first edition this book has been by far the best single resource available for anyone with a serious interest in scientific, medical, biological, nature, botanical, or wildlife illustration.

Don't be daunted by the price - this book is worth far more than the next 10 competing books combined. I've been a professional medical and scientific illustrator for 35 years, and I own hundreds of books on the subject, but I think this single volume should be the foundation of any reference library on visual communication in the biomedical sciences.

There is no greater guide to Scientific Illustration . . .
ELaine Hodges' "The Guild Handbook to Scientific Illustration" is truly a landmark as a reference and the finest on my shelf -- and I cannot count the times I've sought it since 1989 out either to clarify a client's request or as a refresher for some obscure technique (carbon dust, for example) . . .

Even though the book is quite expensive even by reference standards (twice its price of 1989), I would purchase it again without hesitation. Truly, there is no question of hand technique that is left unanswered . . .

If that were not enough, the volume weighs over two kilos and could also prove a formidable weapon . . .

The book is the final word in scientific illustration
Over and over in my work I found myself referring back to this encyclopedic manual. A must for all those in the field of scientific illustration, and a huge help for graphic artists and illustrators in general.

Most authoritative single book in the World in the subject!
The most extensive coverage of media and subject matter for use in creating science art. For use by practicing illustrators. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

I Love This Book
I purchased this book as a reference book for my personal library and found that my children also love it. The illustrations are stunning and helpful on both an artistic and scientific level.

I highly reccomend this book for artists and for anyone interested in nature (including children). My 10 year old lovers to try to draw the images and identify them.

This book is not for someone looking for photographic images.

Science can be art and art can be science
Many patterns in nature are often overlooked. Haeckel captures the natural beauty of living creatures, presenting them in such a way as to spotlight their delicate forms. This black and white rendition of Haeckel's artwork is very impressive, adding a quality perhaps more pleasing to the modern eye than the color originals. Although no written text accompanies the plates, one still understands what the artist is conveying. Haeckel's grouping of the organisms in a very detailed, scientific manner is at the same time aesthetically pleasing to both scientists and nonscientists. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (1)

A superb, international collection of botanical art.
This is an excellent collection of botanical illustrations reproduced in very detailed, rich color on quality paper. Artists from all over the world are represented with brief biographies of each one. I think this book is one of the best books to have if you love botanical illustration and would like to see examples done by highly skilled, scientifically accurate illustrators. Just as good or better than the first Shirley Sherwood collection book. ... Read more

Book Description

What does nature really look like? Today, aided by the wizardry of modern scientific imaging instruments, we are able to see far more of the physical world than we ever dreamed possible. These devices can discern millions of invisible colors, look back in cosmic time some 14 billion years, peer behind and within seemingly opaque borders such as skin and bone, and capture events that last a mere trillionth of a second. Looking through their "eyes," we have acquired powers far more potent than Superman's X-ray vision: the powers of Super Vision.

From microscopes to telescopes, from magnetic-field detectors to chemical mapping probes, today's instruments make possible an entirely new view of nature. Super Vision is a comprehensive showcase of 200 breathtaking scientific images that span the world of phenomena from subatomic particles to the incomprehensibly vast structure of the universe. The accompanying text tells readers what they are looking at and explains the underlying technology. Also included is a huge, groundbreaking chart clearly illustrating the relative sizes of objects covered in the book. At once a primer on the scientific worldview and a reminder of the awesome, multidimensional beauty of nature, Super Vision simultaneously informs and delights. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Spectacular photo book
This is one of the most beautifully illustrated photo books I've ever seen. Ranging from the submicroscopic to the macroscopic and even cosmic in scale, the book presents hundreds of spectacular photos of different aspects of our world and universe. They range from the geometrical perfection of a matrix of metallic crystals, to the delicate tracery of a microbial colony, to amorphous, bloblike, and menacing looking cancer cells, to the graceful symmetry of a galaxy floating in the vastness of space.

Every photographic method you can think of is represented (including many I couldn't have thought of), including ordinary light photography, x-ray, infrared, plane-polarized, electron microscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, and a photo of Washington, D.C. using something called Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar.

In addition to size, the time scales range from subatomic particles that only last a few trillionths of a second to photos of distant galaxies whose light has been travelling for 14 billion years to reach earth. The text is also clear and concise and non-obtrusive and doesn't detract from the visual presentation of the photos. Overall a beautifully illustrated photo book just to browse encompassing the many wonders, young and old, big and small, and animate or inanimate, of our world.

Beautiful Science
I can't remember another book combining scientific insight with artistic beauty quite this way. The author has painstakingly selected, arranged, and captioned stunning scientific images. Whether for the coffee table or to actually read and learn something, Super Vision is a winner.

Stunning book about a beautiful world
From protons to parsecs, Ivan Amato's "Super Vision" reveals what many scientists know: the universe is a visually stunning place. This remarkable collection of images, coupled with Amato's compelling captions, shows the art that can be found in science. Thanks to advances in instruments ranging from atom smashers to telescopes, combined with unprecedented computer power, the phenomena of the cosmos can be painted in vivid color. Scientists use these images in their daily effort to understand the universe; we can enjoy them for pure aesthetic pleasure. Covering 42 orders of magnitude (powers of ten), "Super Vision" shows us the abstract swirls of a decaying particle, the eerie machinery of a spider's spinnerets, how zebrafish scales can look like a Balinese hillside, and the tortured faces of distant planets. For a guide to the art in our natural world, this is the book. It's as beautiful as the universe it describes. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

This beautiful book surveys the evolution of botanical illustration from the crude scratchings of paleolithic man down to the highly scientific work of 20th-century illustrators. With 186 magnificent examples, over 30 in full color. "A classic ... the first book to give us a complete picture of the history of flower illustrations as a whole"—The Sunday Times (London). "The text is as interesting and lively as the illustrations."—The Spectator.
... Read more

Book Description

An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates,the symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental Renaissance image of self, society, and nation. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Scholarly analyses.
Fourteen experts on Renaissance culture and literature dissect various elements of human anatomy to explain how the Early Modern view of the body "in parts" symbolizes the prevailing social conceptions and other aspects of contemporary understanding.
Or, as put in the Introduction: "The relations between bodily and cognitive systems of organization are in many ways most powerfully encoded by the symbolics of any given part, where the tensions between the metaphoric and metonymic, between the floating and the firmly contextualized, or more generally between conditions of autonomy and dependence are powerfully articulated".

(The "score" rating is an ineradicable feature of this page. This reviewer does not "score" books.) ... Read more

Book Description

From early times, artists have been involved in the life and work of the physician in a variety of ways. Members of the medical professions have, in their turn, been central in shaping the visual canon of their profession, from the grandiose drama of the corpse anatomy theater to the intricately worked ivory and metal tools of their trade. The Physician’s Art celebrates the diversity and achievements of such collaborations, looking beyond the traditional boundaries of art to the books and artifacts used by physicians since the fifteenth century and inviting us to ponder their role and that of medicine in the culture of their time and our own.

Published as a companion catalogue to an exhibit of more than one hundred rare and remarkable “medical art” objects that was curated by Julie V. Hansen at the Duke University Museum of Art, this richly illustrated book includes an introductory essay by distinguished art historian Martin Kemp. Demonstrating how the practice of medicine and our understanding of disease and the human body have gone hand in hand with the development of techniques in art—combined with such inventions as the camera and the microscope—this book presents works that range from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, from Europe to the Far East and Africa, from detailed medical illustrations to photographs of ivory manikins and an amputation saw. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

An invaluable aid in teaching, recommended for students.
As an instructor in Scientific Art at the University of Washington for the past 15 years, I have found the 1st and 2nd editions of SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION to be an invaluable aid in my teaching. It has been an excellent resource that I can recommend to my students, both beginning and advanced.

To the beginner it brings step-by-step examples and basic information of materials; to the advanced it brings inspiration and further goals. The richness and diversity of illustration examples, both student and professional, give it an especially unique and appealing quality.

It deserves to be on every artist's shelf, both those specifically interested in the field of science art, as well as those who want to further their basic knowledge of realist art skills.

Kathyrn D. Barker

A valuable resource to both students and teachers.
As a professor at the only small college in the U.S. to offer a degree in scientific illustration, it is extremely valuable for my students to have access to a text that exposes them to the various techniques and applications associated with scientific illustration. Phyllis Wood's Scientific Illustration provides students with both a basic overview of the field, including introductory rendering techniques, and an in-depth discussion of the many applications of the work, such as presentation graphics and exhibit design.

The well-organized contents begin with traditional approaches and media, and end with an excellent chapter on computer applications. The numerous illustrations do not merely supplement the text, but act as lessons in themselves. Many of the best illustrators in the field are represented in the illustration credits.

My students and I are very grateful this resource is available to supplement the material presented in the classroom. ... Read more

Book Description

The essays in this book provide an excellent introduction to the means by which scientists convey their ideas. While diverse in their subject matter, the essays are unified in asserting that scientists compose and use particular representations in contextually organized and contextually sensitive ways, and that these representations - particularly visual displays such as graphs, diagrams, photographs, and drawings - depend for their meaning on the complex activities in which they are situated.

The topics include sociological orientations to representational practice, representation and the realist-constructivist controversy, the fixation of evidence, time and documents in researcher interaction, selection and mathematization in the visual documentation of objects in the life sciences, the use of illustrations in texts (E.0. Wilson's Sociobiology, a field guide to the birds), representing practice in cognitive science, the iconography of scientific texts, and semiotic analysis of scientific, representation.

The contributors are K. Amann, Ronald Amerine, Franoise Bastide, Jack Bilmes, K. Knorr, Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Lynch, Greg Meyers, Lucy A. Suchman, Paul Tibbetts, Steve Woolgar, and Steven Yearley.

Michael Lynch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Boston University. Steve Woolgar is at the Centre for Research into Innovation Culture, and Technology at Brunel University, Uxbridge, England ... Read more

Book Description

Harold Hill's lunar portfolio is a unique collection of drawings now published for the first time. Each illustration is supplemented with notes made at the time of observation. Astronomical drawing still has an important place alongside photography in the same way that photography has not supplanted the artist in the fields of botany and ornithology, for example. Indeed, since astronomical images tend to shimmer because of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, drawings constructed by an artist who takes advantage of the fleeting moments of perfect vision are often more detailed than photographs. No one can fail to be impressed by the beauty and artistry of this work and, to the initiated, the accuracy and attention to detail is remarkable. This is a book for astronomers, amateur and professional alike, and for those who would simply like to know more about the moon. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Wonderful, a must for anyone who enjoys the moon's beauty
Harold Hill's collection of sketches is my favorite of all my books on the moon. Hill has a wonderful sense of the aesthetics of the moon's features, and his meticulous and beautiful sketches show rare lighting conditions seldom caught in photos. More than once I've used his book as a reference to check an unusual feature I've spotted; but more often, I just browse through the sketches, sigh and wish I could draw so well. ... Read more

Book Description

Reviews (2)

Gorgeous book
This book, by David Freedberg, tells the fascinating story of Freedberg's discovery, on a tip from the notorious spy and brilliant art historian Anthony Blunt, of a group of amazing antique drawings stashed away in an obscure cupboard in Windsor Castle. The images, gracefully drawn and beautifully colored, depicted a bizarre range of flora and fauna: deformed lemons with claw-like legs, flamingoes, dramatic portraits of badger faces, strange plants...

The discovery marked the beginning of a great adventure told in the book--of Freedberg's search for and discovery of the source of the drawings: a 17th-century gang of noblemen and eccentrics based largely in Rome who took as their mission nothing less than the discovery, analysis, and visual record of all natural knowledge. They called themselves the Accademia Lincea, or Academy of Lynxes. This was the age of Galileo, who was in fact a member, and whose work the Lincea edited and published. With the aid of microscopes, telescopes, and other instruments, the Lincea and their peers began to develop a picture of the natural world in all its details that profoundly challenged traditional views of Heaven and Earth, supported by the Roman Catholic Church.

Freedberg's manner is at once learned and accessible. He tells a gripping story of a group of fascinating characters, some brilliant, some insane, and their grand projects, including a decidedly obsessive interest in bees. Lavishly illustrated in color and black-and-white, this is surely one of the most attractive, novel, and important works of history this year.

A MUST-HAVE FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN SCIENCE AND ITS HISTORY
Rich in breathtakingly beautiful illustrations (83 color plates, 89 halftones) "The Eye of the Lynx" is a must-have for those with a penchant for science and its history.

We are told that author Freedberg, an art history professor and director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, once happened upon a neglected cupboard in Windsor Castle holding hundreds of intricately precise drawings of plants and animals dating from the Old and New Worlds. He was acting on the word of Anthony Blount, an art historian and British spy. These drawings had been hidden and forgotten since the days of King George III.

Later, after coming across countless more throughout Europe, Freedberg discovered their provenance - a small 17th century scientific group. Based in Italy it was called the Academy of Linceans for Lynx-eyed.

This optimistic organization set as their goal the representation of all nature in pictures. The mighty task of the Linceans is recounted for the first time in English in this wondrous book. They, unlike their predecessors, focused on internal structures rather than external appearances.

For its time, one of the most outre ideas proposed by the Linceans was the microscope. They simply turned Galileo's telescope around and exposed a once invisible world.

Freedberg has rendered an enormous service in bringing to light this integral portion of the development of visuals as related to natural history.

- Gail Cooke ... Read more

Book Description

The Digital Biomedical Illustration Handbook is the only book currently available that provides in-depth coverage of the medical illustration field. It includes a brief history of the field, a state-of-the-industry, an overview of the training required to be a medical illustrator, and the techniques and tools used to create high-quality digital illustrations with Photoshop® CS and 3ds max™ 6. This beautifully illustrated book is written for artists, graphic designers, art directors, art students, and those interested in learning about medical illustration.

The goal of the medical illustrator has always been to educate, conceptualize, and clearly communicate biomedical knowledge visually to the scientific community and the public at large. However, the tools used to achieve this goal have changed significantly in the past few years, and this book teaches artists how to adapt their skills to the digital realm. Artists will learn how to use digital tools to create a variety of professional quality illustrations—surgical, editorial, veterinary, patient education, real-time 3D for the Web, and molecular and cellular animation.

If you are interested in learning about medical illustration and the skills it requires, or if you are a practicing illustrator looking for new insights, this is the one resource you’ll need.

Key Features
* Teaches practical techniques through step-by-step tutorials using Photoshop® CS, 3ds max™ 6, and Anark Studio 2.5
* Includes in-depth explanations of various medical illustration specializations
* Features interviews with medical art buyers, students, and practicing medical illustrators
* Provides information about copyrights and a glossary of the medical terms found in the book

ON THE CD-ROM
* All the files necessary to complete the tutorials
* Color figures from the book
* Trial version of Photoshop CS

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
WINDOWS ONLY (To complete the tutorials in chapters 5-8 you need Photoshop CS and for chapters 9-11 you need 3ds max. Chapter 9 requires a copy of Anark Studio 2.5 – free trial available on the Web). FOR PHOTOSHOP CS: Intel® Pentium® III/4 processor or equivalent processor ; Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 3 or Windows XP ; 192MB of RAM (256MB recommended) 280MB of available hard-disk space ; Color monitor with 16-bit color or greater video card; 1024x768 or greater monitor resolution; CD-ROM drive. FOR 3ds max™: Intel® or AMD® processor at 300 Mhz minimum; Dual Intel Xeon or dual AMD Athlon recommended; Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 3, Windows XP Pro, XP Home; DirectX9 or OpenGL; 512MB RAM minimum. 1GB RAM recommended; Graphics card supporting 1024x768, 16-bit color, with 64MB RAM. OpenGL and Direct3D hardware acceleration supported; Color monitor with 16-bit color or greater video card CD-ROM drive. ... Read more

Book Description

Some of the most ravishing images in the history ofillustrationhave been those of plants. But who drew plants, and why? How have theseimagesreflected our changing relationship with the natural world? Thisbeautifullyillustrated book explores the purpose and function of the whole range ofbotanical art, from early woodcut herbals and painted florilegia,botanicaltreatises and records of new discoveries, to gardening manuals, seedcatalogs,and field guides for the amateur enthusiast. Gill Saunders complementsthesumptuous illustrations with detailed captions and an informative text,makingthis a book for both specialist and lay reader. Drawing on a rich archive of material in the Victoria and Albert Museum,much ofit unpublished until now, Saunders presents works ranging from thefifteenth- century printed book to the art of contemporary illustrators. Sheincludesacknowledged masters such as Ehret and Redout as well as lesser-knownexamplesfrom China, Japan, and India. In addition to their intrinsic beauty, plant illustrations have mirroredthecurious and fascinating relationship between art and science. Theartist'schallenge has been to reconcile the often conflicting demands of thosedisciplines within a single image. Picturing Plants captures both thiscomplexcultural history and the distinctive loveliness of botanicalillustration,bringing a fresh approach to a perennially fascinating subject. ... Read more

Book Description

Indispensable resource of more than 600 copyright-free illustrations for artists, desktop publishers, nature enthusiasts, and craftworkers provides accurate, attractive depictions of wildflowers, trees, herbs, cacti, tropical blooms, garden flowers, common weeds, house plants, mushrooms, medicinal plants, and much more. Each illustration is identified and an index makes it easy to find specific plants.
... Read more