A - Z Task and Research for Presentation

Our first task as a group (of 5 people including myself) was to write an A-Z list of all potential careers within the field of Illustration with each alphabet. We began writing what each one of us know what job or profession starts what letter which started off easy, however, it rapidly became harder for us to find out what career names that start with letters that we don’t really come across, such as the letters Q, V, X, Y, Z etc.

We managed to find more than one career that fits under an alphabet, such as the letter C, where ‘Concept Art’ or ‘Children’s book illustration’ would fit under, however we could only pick one but at least we got more than one answer for one letter, though finding ones that we could not think from the top of our heads was beginning to itch our heads and we ended up writing jobs that are some-what not related to the career of Illustration at all as we just filled in what we know ourselves. We struggle to find some but ended up giving up and the sheet has a mixture of jobs that are both related and not related within the professional practice of illustration.

For a 15 min task we did what we could, and finding career names with the letters such as Q, V or X boggled our minds and made up gave up fairly easily, it was fun, but it was over pretty quick.

Afterwards we picked the one career from the A-Z task to create a presentation and we chose Scientific Illustration. We ended up debating for quite a while because one of us thought it was a boring topic and the others are opened about it. I wanted to do it, because it is what I and everyone else knows about, plus it is an interesting topic to look into. We tried to persuade the one who was against it and he eventually gave in, though he didn’t put a lot of input into talking about it afterwards.

We all did our individual research and I accidently left my part to the last minute which was my fault as I was concentrating on other projects that are simultaneously going at the same time (Sequential Illustration, Advance Drawing and Theory). It was a slight rush to add my part as the last part of the presentation with only 2 slides, though I know what I wanted to talk about so it was ok, yet was a little nervous. The others had researched what and how scientific illustrations had helped us, both historically and in the present, while I chose to look into how the technical side scientific illustrations has reached into entertainment design, such as creating and designing imaginary animals for film, games and other works of sci-fi and fantasy fiction, that would often require scientific analysis on how the animal operates so the art team understands what they are creating.

I concentrated on one artist, known as Terryl Whitlach, who was a paleontological recreationist who reimagines extinct prehistorical animals from the bones up. Her background is useful to the topic of scientific illustrations and how of her work stems from it ranging from zoology and animal anatomy as well as fantasy generated animals. I own a copy of a book about her work so it was really useful to use as my main primary research. 

Cover of the Book that showcases varies works by Terryl.