Stories by Glendon Mellow

The hot new messaging app made a rookie mistake and once again respect for image creators takes a back seat to aggressive feature-rollout.

This simple painting by Christine Rueter will mean volumes for those who remember the Challenger disaster. 

Time again for an INVIVO Communications holiday game - activate Rudolph's nose by traveling the neural pathway. 

A children's art-and-alphabet book is giving back to the field of research that inspired its creation.

Art Business Boot Camp ends registration today! Check out why Symbiartic's Glendon Mellow thinks this class could help push your career forward.

Now everyone faces the same problem that illustrators have faced since the internet started.

This week, Glendon Mellow of Symbiartic will be curating the rotating humanities Twitter account, @WeTheHumanities.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to speak at Ryerson University's Social Media Lab about science communication. 

Here's the video of my talk, Future-Proofing Dinosaur Tattoos: Communicating Science on Social Media. I touch on the importance of sharing your expertise, building community and using Twitter. Oh and rad dinosaur ink.

While I often share fairly realistic, illustrative art sometimes a more abstracted piece just smacks you in the forehead like an impatient bumblebee. 

The Rhombus Bombus by David Orr is exactly that type of piece. 

How do you future-proof a dinosaur tattoo design?

This Thursday, October 8th Symbiartic's Glendon Mellow will be at Ryerson University's new launched Social Media Lab exploring how we communicate science through social media, specifically while using images. And it's going to be live streamed on Periscope! 

Scientifically there can be so much wrong, but artistically so much wonderful. Kaitlin Beckett of A Curious Bestiary has done it again, this time with some anthropomorphic skeletal dinosaurs who have attached feathers to their bony frames using scotch tape and wire. 

I love a good visual metaphor. 

Even in an age where everything can be recorded, we are used to thinking of voices as somewhat ephermeral, fleeting. Painter Angela He (a.k.a. Visaga) has shown our voices can have a lot more solidity to them. Imagine if a painting like this were on the cover of MacWorld or Wired.

Honing your artistic skills can be a huge challenge once you've set your sights on realism. For wildlife painters, they need to be masters of it all - they can't spend 20 years mastering the human form when the world is filled with mountain lions, birch trees, stag beetles and granite.

The artistically-restless Carel Pieter Brest van Kempen goes further than many wildlife artists. With each work, he tackles some new challenge of subject matter or composition. 

It's like a Labour Day fable.  

Few artists could be more important to what this day stands for than Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Let's take a look at how science and technology appear in a famously destroyed and re-created painting.

Our September SciArt Blitz is bringing you new science-inspired art every day this month, and of course we always enjoy featuring work from the rich ecosystem of paleoartists. When Emily Willoughby returned to class in the past couple of weeks, she did want most visual thinkers do: she doodled in her notebook. And what a doodle!

The glowing promise of AR, or augmented reality, promises us vast potential when it's paraded in pop culture. AR in fiction is used for important stuff and it looks cool while doing it. 

The InvisibleEar, created by biomedical communicator Andréa Zariwny, hits that mark of being both cool and useful. 

Celebrities, journalists and politicians are all likely to receive the coveted Verified badge on Twitter. Presumably, this is due to all of these careers adding value to the platform for the average user, and to distinguish their identities from malicious imposters and parody accounts.

There's another group that adds consistent value to the experience of using Twitter: image creators.

The technique of hatching, using many thin, parallel lines to describe form, texture and shadow has been in use since at least the middle ages. It lends itself well to etching, engraving and drawing, and was a favourite technique of Albrecht Dürer.

Mathematics-inspired artist Hamid Yeganah uses formulas to push crosshatching into stunning and complex forms. 

The Chrome extension for Twitter was installed, and I had time for a quick shower before cycling to work. Without letting myself think about it too much, I pressed MASS UNFOLLOW, saw it was working, and ran to the shower.

As the probe whizzes past, paint is already being dabbed, splattered and scumbled. The Pluto flyby is astounding everyone including artists. Here are a few works of #sciart that really stood out to me on Twitter, marking this historic event and the images from the NASA team and the New Horizons probe.

[post header image by Stella Maria Baer]

Painter Marcel Guldemond has tapped into something that's increasingly on my mind lately - art that normalizes science and our potential future. 

Oh here we go again. The Internet Image Cop is astride his high horse and galloping through the online festival while popping everyone's balloons

The wildfires in British Columbia are creating an alien world in over the city of Victoria. There are currently over 170 fires burning, and the ash and smoke has prompted a health warning. After seeing a couple of surreal photos on social media last night, I contacted the photographers so I could share them here

In a unique stylistic choice in the history of fine art, angsty Symbolist painter Jean Delville chose to depict an allegorical Satan dominating his treasured souls while standing on a coral reef.