#sciartseptember — Public Fediverse posts

If you enjoyed #SciArtSeptember, and wish it wasn't over, don't fret. It's now #Mathtober!

Already seeing some great math-art, and I'm loving it!

That's a wrap for #SeptemBee! This month I painted 28 species of bees, 1 isopod, and 1 landscape (not pictured), each relating to the daily #SciArtSeptember prompt (which I was able to stick to far more easily than anticipated!)
I hope you enjoyed learning about bees! I'm off to hibernate until next year :)

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Last day of #SeptemBee! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "dream" I've picked a bee famous for how it sleeps. Amegilla cingulata, the blue banded bee, is frequently pictured asleep, legs curled and clinging to a twig by its mandibles. Though it almost exclusively prefers blue flowers, it has become an important pollinator in Australia due to its method of buzz pollination.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 30 of #SciArtSeptember prompt dream: Kepler’s Somnium. This hand-printed linocut illustrates astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler’s science fiction story Somnium, or “The Dream”. Kepler (1571-1630) wrote the strange manuscript in Latin, and circulated it amongst friends, with the intention of eventually publishing it but he died before that could could happen. (It also escaped his control and contributed to 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #histsci #sciart #Kepler #mastoArt #astronomy

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: "Scattering".

I decided to draw some fungi for today's drawing.

The Maker Faire is over, so it's back to normality again...well whatever normality is these days. I had time, so I also drew some penguins. It feels great to have more time for drawing again!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/137994342
https://ko-fi.com/Post/InkyDays-September-2025-D1D11KNP2I

#ink #drawing #art #SciArt #fungi #GenerativeArt #ProceduralArt

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: Scattering

I accidentally found this effect while brooming one day, is it scattering the light?
Uploading the vid so you can see how the rings of light change depending on the position of the reflecting metal.

#physics #light #scattering #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: Scattering

I accidentally found this effect while brooming one day, is it scattering the light?
Uploading the vid so you can see how the rings of light change depending on the position of the reflecting metal.

#physics #light #scattering #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: Scattering

I accidentally found this effect while brooming one day, is it scattering the light?
Uploading the vid so you can see how the rings of light change depending on the position of the reflecting metal.

#physics #light #scattering #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: Scattering

I accidentally found this effect while brooming one day, is it scattering the light?
Uploading the vid so you can see how the rings of light change depending on the position of the reflecting metal.

#physics #light #scattering #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 29: Scattering

I accidentally found this effect while brooming one day, is it scattering the light?
Uploading the vid so you can see how the rings of light change depending on the position of the reflecting metal.

#physics #light #scattering #PhonePhotography

#SeptemBee 29th #SciArtSeptember prompt "foresight."

This is Bombus terrestris, the buff tailed bumblebee. As one of Europe's most common bees, it is also a frequent subject of behavior and intelligence studies, and it turns out bees can be pretty smart. They communicate by dancing, can learn and remember maps and faces, they show signs of PTSD if you harass them too much, and yes, even show signs of foresight.

B. terrestris, for example, continuously monitors its nest's honey and pollen reserves. If it gets too low, they will start biting and chewing the leaf buds off tomato plants. This damage induces the plant to start flowering and provide more nectar and pollen for the hive.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 29 #SciArtSeptember prompt foresight: #botanist E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984), here with plants she studied.

A trailblazer for #womenInSTEM in India, expert in cytogenetics, phytogeography, coauthor Chromosomal Atlas of Plants, 1st Indian woman PhD & early woman in US #botany PhD, environmental activist who wrote about need to incorporate indigenous knowledge in sustainable development. Her name lives on in names of plants: Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal, 🧵

#printmaking #sciart #mastoArt

#SciArtSeptember Day 28: "Tessellation"

I felt like adding some little fish to this one. I didn't have a lot of time for my #inkyDays drawing today, as I had to leave early for the Maker Faire this morning.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/137994342
https://ko-fi.com/Post/InkyDays-September-2025-D1D11KNP2I

#ink #drawing #art #MakerFaire #sfba #GenerativeArt #ProceduralArt

#SeptemBee 28th! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt "harvest" I've chosen a squash bee, Peponapis pruinosa, although there are lots of bees colloquially called "squash bees."

Do yourself a favor: look inside a big orange squash/pumpkin flower one morning and say hi to your new best friend. Squash bees have been quietly following humans and their crops around North America (and beyond) for thousands of years. They may spend their entire lives in a single field, pollinating only cucurbits. As solitary ground nesters, no-till methods are vital for preserving their habitat and their continuing pollination services.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 28 #SciArtSeptember prompt harvest. Echoing my print of insects for Manufactured Ecosystems about the future of pollination this print is intended to drive home how much we are dependent on insect pollinators. These are many of the food crops we grow here in Ontario which benefit from insects. I didn’t include crops grown for oil or as livestock feed. (Some are representative of a category, 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #mastoArt #ManufacturedEcosystems #food #agriculture #pollination

#SciArtSeptember Day 27: "Symbiosis"

So, how could I resist drawing some mitochondria in today's #inkyDays.

#SciArt #ink #drawing #art

#SeptemBee 27th! The #SciArtSeptember theme is "bound" so I chose a geographically restricted species, Xylocopa darwini. These carpenter bees are the only bees native to the Galapagos Islands - up until relatively recently, they were the only bees there at all!

You get two today because I love the sexual dimorphism in the species. They look suspiciously like the valley carpenter bee (X. sonorina) that I painted for Valentine's Day earlier this year. Perhaps some lost queen got blown over the ocean a long long time ago and landed on an island full of tortoises.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 27 #SciArtSeptember prompt bounded made me think of electrons and how whether they are bounded or free determines the nature of materials so I’m sharing my portrait of Millie Dresselhaus (née Spiewak; November 11, 1930 – February 20, 2017). She was a professor of physics and electrical engineering at MIT, known as the Queen of Carbon Science.

In this linocut I’ve shown her in front of a carbon nanotube. 🧵1/

#linocut #printmaking #engineering #physics #mastoArt #womenInSTEM #histsci

#SciArtSeptember Day 26: "Convergence".

I went a bit abstract with it in today's drawing.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/137994342
https://ko-fi.com/Post/InkyDays-September-2025-D1D11KNP2I

#ink #drawing #art #SciArt

#SeptemBee 26th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme "foraging" I've chosen the alfalfa leafcutter bee, Megachile rotundata.

Alfalfa is one of the most important forage crops around the world. The flowers have a trap mechanism that is triggered when a bee lands on its keel petal. The flower whomps the bee on the head with its spring-loaded pistils, depositing pollen as it probes around for nectar. Honey bees don't like getting hit in the head and will chew through the petals to bypass the trap, but M. rotundata don't care at all!

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 26 #SciArtSeptember prompt forage. My #linocut of #botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), renown algae expert, celebrated seaweed cook, devoted teacher and mentor, expert on Hawaiian ethnobotany, the first Indigenous Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science and the first woman or person of colour to become a full professor on Stanford’s biology faculty. 🧵
#printmaking #sciart #seaweed #limu #Hawaii #biology #IsabellaAbbott #algae #Indigenous #womenInSTEM #histsci #MastoArt

#SeptemBee the 25th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme of tireless I've chosen one of the few (known) nocturnal bees, Megalopta genalis. These Central American sweat bees have absolutely enormous eyes, which are specially adapted for the polarized light of dawn and dusk. Many of its favored flowers open at sunset.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee 24th! For the #SciArtSeptember theme of "numbered" I've chosen the blue calamintha bee, Osmia calaminthae. These bees are very hard to find, having only been observed at 11 sites within a narrow range of sandy Florida scrub since they were first described in 2011. They are specialists of the calamintha plant for which they are named.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee the 23rd! The #SciArtSeptember theme is "scouting" so I chose another eusocial honey bee, the red dwarf honey bee (Apis florea). When swarming in search of a new home, scout bees will dance to let their fellow hive mates know of a suitable location. Unlike western honey bees, however, this dwarf bee's dance includes tiny squeaking sounds! The more excited the chatter, the more likely the bees are to pick that scout's location.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee 22 - Happy Autumn!

The #SciArtSeptember theme is "Fellowship" as in "of the Ring" and fun fact! Did you know that of the over 200 taxa named for Tolkien and his works - including dozens of moths, and six recently discovered wasps mostly named for hobbits in the genus "Shireplitis" - there's only one bee?

And this one's a fellowship destroyer - Austrosphecodes balrog, or as I like to call it, the Balrog bee.

Are its wings real? Are they metaphorical? We may never know, but we do know that these cuckoo bees are aggressive brood parasites, often attacking solitary bees before laying eggs in their nests. I can imagine a big hairy Gandalf bee at the entrance shouting "You Shall Not Pass!"

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

For day 22 of #sciArtSeptember prompt fellowship, I am sharing my portrait of #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who took her $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of #pulsars & leadership in science and donated money to the Institute of Physics for PhD scholarships for underrepresented people including women, ethnic minorities & refugee students in physics! #linocut #printmaking #histsci

As a grad student in ‘67 she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a 🧵

#SeptemBee* the 21st. I had to do something a little different for the #SciArtSeptember theme of "reef" because it turns out there are no reef bees. In fact, for entirely too long scientists just kind of assumed there were no underwater pollinators at all - who needs it, when water can just carry your gametes around? (What terrible logic - so many land plants are wind pollinated!)

It wasn't until 2022 that someone decided to actually watch underwater plants, in this case algae, and found that invertebrates like this little isopod (Idotea balthic), nicknamed the bumblebee of the sea, do in fact carry pollen around and aid in plant reproduction.

All this AI crap being shoved in our faces but so much of scientific knowledge still just relies on paying attention to your surroundings.

#SciArt #InvertArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee day 20! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "glacial" I chose an arctic bumblebee, Bombus mixtus; commonly found in mountain meadows, forests, and tundra habitats. They are known to nest and forage at elevations over 12,000 feet!

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee 19th - for #SciArtSeptember I went with "height" instead of "depth" and picked the Himalayan giant honey bee, Apis laboriosa. These guys build comb nests high up on sheer cliff faces, but that doesn't stop people from climbing up there on rope ladders to get at the honey!

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee the 18th! I've painted a pebble bee, Dianthidium floridiense, which vaguely relates to the #SciArtSeptember theme of "cenote" because... rocks?

Pebble bees use plant resin to build their nests out of - you guessed it, pebbles! - cementing the masses to branches or stone walls.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 18 #SciArtSeptember prompt cenote, or the limestone sinkholes accessible by ground water, a term originally only used for characteristic features in the Yucatán, Mexico and now applied more broadly to karst features anywhere, including in Australia, where fascinating but endangered stygofauna: aquatic animals who live underground, can be found. This is a hard-carved and hand-printed linocut 🧵

#linocut #printmaking #sciart #invertebrate #stygofauna #mastoArt #amphipod #crustacean

#SeptemBee 17th. For the #SciArtSeptember theme of "trawl" I've picked ... an oil-digging bee, Centris rhodopus, because ocean trawling and digging for oil are both bad for the environment, right? ;)

These bees aren't bad for the environment, but they are known for collecting oils from plants instead of pollen. They often live in deserts and can tolerate higher temperatures than most bees - maybe it's easier to work with oils then?

#SciArtSeptember #InsectArt #watercolor

Day 17 #SciArtSeptember prompt is trawl.

Glass sponges are fragile, brittle, living animals with skeletons made of silica, the same material we use to make glass. Reefs, widespread during the age of dinosaurs, are now quite rare, & in fact, were long believed to have gone extinct 40 million years ago. Then in 1987 scientists discovered 9,000 year glass sponge reefs or 🧵
#linocut #sciart #printmaking #glassSponge #glassSpongeReef #rockfish #oceanLife #invertebrate #reductionPrint #BC #mastoArt

#SeptemBee the 16th! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "rift" I've painted a cliff mason bee, Osmia xanthomelana. These bees build nests on eroded cliff faces and in loose soil. They dig out a small cavern then construct individual brood cells out of mud, provisioning them with pollen from bird's foot trefoil for their larvae.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

For Day 16 #sciArtSeptember prompt rift: my portrait of #geologist & oceanographic #cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006), whose pioneering, thorough & complete ocean floor maps with Bruce Heezen, made using realms of echo sounder data, revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.⁠
⁠
After studying #geology & math, Maurice ‘Doc’ Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia hired her to draft 1000s of echo sounder profiles.
🧵1/n
#sciart #printmaking #womenInSTEM #histstem #linocut #mastoArt

#SeptemBee 15th - halfway there! For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of spawning, I've painted a silver digger bee, Habropoda miserabilis, which are known for their mating behaviors. Males emerge first in the spring, then wait around the entrances for the females to emerge. Because females only mate once, it becomes a race to get there first, often resulting in large, squirming balls of horny males surrounding the female and fighting to get on top.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee 14th. For the #SciArtSeptember prompt of "mimic" I've painted a bee who looks suspiciously like a wasp. Nomada edwardsii are brood parasites; females lay their eggs in already prepared cells from other bees. After hatching, the nomad bee larva first eats its host larva, then all its nectar and pollen provisions.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SciArtSeptember Day 14: Fractals.

Remember my post about trying to grow voronoi cells by pressing paint between two sheets of plastic? https://mastoart.social/@enriquericos/115158341455994572

I accidentally found out that, by separating the sheets, one can create fractal lines (I don't remember the exact name of this structure)

#SciArt #Fractals #Paint #naturalPatterns #nature #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 14: Fractals.

Remember my post about trying to grow voronoi cells by pressing paint between two sheets of plastic? https://mastoart.social/@enriquericos/115158341455994572

I accidentally found out that, separating the sheets, one can create fractal lines (I don't remember the exact name of this structure)

#SciArt #Fractals #Paint #naturalPatterns #nature #iPhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 14: Fractals.

Remember my post about trying to grow voronoi cells by pressing paint between two sheets of plastic? https://mastoart.social/@enriquericos/115158341455994572

I accidentally found out that, by separating the sheets, one can create fractal lines (I don't remember the exact name of this structure)

#SciArt #Fractals #Paint #naturalPatterns #nature #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 14: Fractals.

Remember my post about trying to grow voronoi cells by pressing paint between two sheets of plastic? https://mastoart.social/@enriquericos/115158341455994572

I accidentally found out that, by separating the sheets, one can create fractal lines (I don't remember the exact name of this structure)

#SciArt #Fractals #Paint #naturalPatterns #nature #PhonePhotography

#SciArtSeptember Day 14: Fractals.

Remember my post about trying to grow voronoi cells by pressing paint between two sheets of plastic? https://mastoart.social/@enriquericos/115158341455994572

I accidentally found out that, by separating the sheets, one can create fractal lines (I don't remember the exact name of this structure)

#SciArt #Fractals #Paint #naturalPatterns #nature #PhonePhotography

Day 14 #SciArtSeptember prompt is mimic. This print shows a great little pollinator in the garden: a transverse-banded flower fly (Eristalis transversa) on Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower. Because of its yellow stripes, tendency to hover (it’s a hover fly after all) and love of flowers, this little insect can be mistaken for a bee, but it’s a bee-mimic fly. Like the bees, it’s an important pollinator and 🧵1/2
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #insect #flowerFly #echinacea #mastoArt

#SeptemBee the 13th. For the #SciArtSeptember theme of bottleneck I've chosen a likely extinct species of cuckoo bumblebee, Bombus variabilis. Cuckoo bumblebees are social parasites that are incapable of collecting pollen or producing a worker caste. They take over extant nests by killing the queen and exploiting the unrelated workers, forcing them to care for her and her brood.

As a parasitic species, these guys are dependent on the success of its host; in this case, B. pensylvanicus, which is also declining throughout its native range. As a result, the variable cuckoo bee hasn't been seen in over twenty years, and may very well be extinct.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor

#SeptemBee 12th. The #SciArtSeptember theme is "wandering", so I've chosen the most widespread of bees, the western honey bee (Apis mellifera). Thanks to people, these guys can be found on nearly every continent... For better or for worse. As an invasive species, honey bees displace native bees and reduce biodiversity. Someone in my neighborhood started beekeeping this summer, and the local bees have nearly disappeared.

#SciArt #InsectArt #watercolor