Natural History Illustration

A quick guide to the species Equisetum (horsetails and scouring rushes) for the Kollath+Stensaas field guide Ferns & Allies of the North Woods by Joe Walewski.

Ain’t it pretty? No distracting captions this time, just the raw art.

The aftermath of knee replacement surgery.

Just four kinds of Northwoods bracket fungi.

It’s exciting to unearth these delightful little flowers under their leaf-detritus comforters in the spring.

From Earthworms of the Great Lakes: “Earthworm Internal Anatomy”
Worms! Eeew! Gross! But kinda interesting.

Nature is clever. The calapogon orchid lures an unsuspecting bee onto its attractive-looking lip which snaps shut, forcing the hapless critter to crawl out though a tight space. The reproductive parts are below which the bee pollinates with its furry back.

Also an Aminita. Interestingly, plucking a mushroom does no more harm to the main (underground) body than picking an apple from a tree.

Worms? Eew! Taken from the Kollath+Stensaas Earthworms of the Great Lakes field guide, the name basically says it all.

From Ferns & Allies of the North Woods by Joe Walewski, 2016.

Part of a series of illustrations done for the Bauer-Hartz Laboratory, this one is brain artery cross-section.

This was the most complex and fascinating illustration I’ve done. Lots of cool reference stuff to look over, lots of coaching by the lead researcher, Bjorn Bauer, and lots of head-scratching to get it right.

Yes we did a book on earthworms: they’re deeper than you thought. Though it’s a bit hard to see the Epigeic kind up in the leaf litter, there are three types of earthworms shown here in their respective habitats.

Shows the major ID points and differences between damselflies and dragonflies.

Done as tradeout for some shoulder rotator cuff work. Coincidentally it’s about rotator cuff stuff.

You can’t show mushrooms and not show an Amanita muscaria if you’ve done one. It’s kind of the starter mushroom for budding mycologists.

Shows one form of lichen reproduction.

An early illustration from an early Kollath+Stensaas book: Wildflowers of the BWCA and the North Shore. I did this oddly-shaped illustration before I gave much thought to the layout.

You never know what you’re going to learn when you start working on these books. As a climber, I’ve spent plenty of time on and around glaciers but never understood how they worked until I did this page for Amazing Agates.

I LOVE these kinds of sciency, info-laden illustrations!

Pretty cool plant: carnivorous, alien-looking and beautiful.

Morchella, i.e., morels, is a remarkably flavorful and therefore much sought after by a certain class of foodie. This particular example is just a bit more vertical than it should be, though still pretty representative of the species.

The magic of illustration let me unnaturally age this cluster.

An porphyritic* form of Rhyolite found only at the very base of Palisade Head on Lake Superior, a place my climbing career has steered me toward many times.

*”Porphyritic” means that while the rock was still molten magma — but getting near the surface and thus considerably cooled down — certain minerals like quartz and feldspar began forming crystals. This magma soon spewed out and formed solid lava. The stuff that had been liquid cooled into a fine-grained rock interspersed with the larger, prominent crystals seen as little blocky structures in the illustration. Not to be confused with the lighter horizontal band, but that’s another story about flow-banding.