More Plants!

Some extended plant phylogenies

Pixel Art!

Pixel Art!

Another quick pixel creation, this time with animation!

Pixel Art!

Some more pixel art!

Pixel Art!

Decided to do some pixel art, based off that ‘ice age’ creature you can see there!

Orchids, Bees, and Bee-Vision!

While at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens here in Richmond, I’ve been evolving some Orchids. You can see me going through part of the process in that video there, but here’s the phylogenetic tree of the flowers as well. At the 2nd generation the bees are introduced, along with ‘bee vision’ which is a red filter in our case. Bee’s actually see far more colors than people can (especially the ultraviolet) so they would probably see things that looked more blue or purple, but the red filters worked well in our case. If you look up ‘what bee’s see’ or ultraviolet photos of flowers, you can see a more realistic depiction of what a bee would see when they look at a plant. This should also give you an idea

For us, the colors blue as well as darker colors in general stand out a lot more than something like red, which would appear invisible. The flowers also began to look more like bees, as is the case of the actual bee orchid, a flower which has evolved to look so much like bees that actual bees try to mate with it and get stuck with pollen instead.

I’ve included a ‘bee vision’ version of the tree as well, to give you an idea of how the flowers looked through the hand lenses. You can see how the very first generation before the bee’s are introduced to the game have almost invisible flowers.

Linocut!

Last Wednesday I carried out my evolution simulation at a Lunchbreak Science seminar at the Science Museum of Virginia, here in Richmond. As everything was wrapping up, I held a small raffle for some prints I made from a linocut block that I had fashioned (based on one of my favorite critters) which you can see above!

Evolution! At the Science Museum of Virginia

I ran through my evolution project at the Science Museum of Virginia today and plan on doing a custom version of my existing animation for them (hopefully finished by Darwin Day, Feb 12th).

In the meantime, here are some sound effects I recorded from them!

WRIR, The Creative Habit, and Me!

I was interviewed by WRIR (local Richmond independent radio station) a little while ago, and apparently its aired as the first episode of The Creative Habit! So if you ever wanted to hear me talk about my evolution project for 30 mins and say “right” 8 times in rapid succession, then click here!

Watercolors!

Here are some watercolor paintings I did for my friends Ruthie and Ian Edwards, based off of their original creature drawings. The drawings they made are from about a year ago when I had my animation playing at the Main Street Library here in Richmond, Virginia, and I managed to convince them to doodle some critters for me!