Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration for public health - a skull looks over a whiskey bottle and a gasoline pump under the block type "DON'T MIX 'EM"

Science Art: Don’t Mix ‘Em!, by Robert Lachenman for the Work Projects Administration, 1936.

7 January 2024 grant 0

There’s a killer on the road indeed. The WPA released this poster to discourage drunk driving, or at least running your hotrod on moonshine. Public […]

Scientific illustration of Punica granatum, the "Punic apple" or pomegranate.

Science Art: Punica Granatum, 1829

31 December 2023 grant 0

This tasty-looking fruit is from a medical text – Medical Botany: or, Illustrations and Descriptions of the Medicinal Plants of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin […]

Scientific illustration of lynxes in the snow. Two big cats with tufts on their ears growling at each other over what might be a recent kill. Or a log. It's hard to tell. The cats, though, are very vivid.

Science Art: Lynxes, by Louis Sargent, 1909

24 December 2023 grant 0

Two cats at dusk, growling in the snow. The nights have been long, but they’re growing shorter. May you survive your own lonely wilderness and […]

Scientific illustration of a "disk of Heaven" or bi.

Science Art: Ancient Ritual White Jade Disk of Heaven…, 1937

17 December 2023 grant 0

This is an illustration from a 1937 edition of Natural History magazine, an article called “Chinese Design.” This is a “Disk of Heaven,” or bi, […]

Scientific illustration of the Ryan 262 Manta Ray aircraft, a remote-controlled military drone from the 1970s

Science Art: Ryan 262 Manta Ray: Program Status Report cover, 1975

10 December 2023 grant 0

This is the cover of a report on the Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical “Navy Mini-Drone (STARS),” otherwise known as the Manta Ray. It was a fiberglass […]

Scientific illustration as an infographic depicting three basic types of planets discovered orbiting stars elsewhere in the galaxy.

Science Art: Exoplanets Poster, Institute of Physics, 2023

3 December 2023 grant 0

This is a… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, really. Unlike most of the images collected here, it’s got its own description printed right on it. These […]

Scientific illustration of an Avrocar, a silver, disc-shaped aerial vehicle, gleaming steel and black vents, parked outside a shaded hangar.

Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.

26 November 2023 grant 0

This is not a movie prop, but a working prototype of the Avrocar, a disc-shaped flying machine that graced the skies between 1959 and 1961. […]

Scientific illustration of a CB microphone. Well, an ad of one, anyway. Very mid-century lines on this this microphone. It could practically be a Chrysler tailfin.

Science Art: Turner +2: The Best CB Microphone in the World, 1966.

19 November 2023 grant 0

This is an ad from the April 1966 “Tools and Test Measurement Issue” of Popular Electronics, which I found on archive.org. Lovely design on this […]

Scientific Illustration depicting how eye-spots draw attention even in a confusing visual field.

Science Art: Diagram illustrating the inherent conspicuousness of an eye-spot…, Cott, 1942.

13 November 2023 grant 0

An illustration showing how noticeable an eye actually is, from the text The Vertebrate Eye and Its Adaptive Radiation, which looks at eyes, eyes everywhere, […]

Scientific illustration of a machine to track the height of a thing.

Science Art: Altitude and azimuth instrument, 1876.

5 November 2023 grant 0

How high? This device will tell you. It’s from The great Centennial exhibition critically described and illustrated, by Phillip T. Sandhurst, which you can read […]

Science Art: Sea Sirens, by A.A. Jansson, 1930.

30 October 2023 grant 0

“The efforts made by oversober scientists to reduce such marvels to coldly reasonable origins have in a few specific cases been only too successful,” wrote […]

Scientific Illustration of the Wright Brothers' airplane in the patent application.

Science Art: 821393 – Flying Machine – Wright Brothers, May 22, 1906.

23 October 2023 grant 0

It’s an airplane. Maybe the airplane. And this is how it looked when the U.S. Patent Office made it official. I found the illustration on […]

Scientific illustration of early radio equipment, in an advertisement for the Two-Step Multi-Audi-Fone, which comes with a pocket receiver and a "special head set." The M.A.F. costs $60 unless you order it after October 1, in which case it's $75. Which is quite a lot in 1916 dollars.

Science Art: Two-Step Multi-Audi-Fone ad, 1916.

16 October 2023 grant 0

This is an ad from, as Thomas Dolby put it, the Golden Age of wireless. More literally, it’s from the October, 1916, issue of The […]

Scientific illustration showing the inside of a virus, specifically a Rheavirus (aka Cafeteriavirus). It looks a little like a 20-sided die from Dungeons & Dragons that's been covered with lizard skin.

Science Art: Cafeteria virion by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics ViralZone.

8 October 2023 grant 0

It looks like a D20 wrapped in iguana leather and filled with caramel and chocolate sprinkles. It’s actually a rheavirus, also known as cafeteriavirus. It’s […]

Scientific illustration of the solar system, as a map of the night sky, from the 1800s. It's like a Victorian planetarium.

Science Art: Planetary Systems, with Five Opening Flaps, from Geographical Studies by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887.

1 October 2023 grant 0

I found this fascinating artifact in a wonderful article in Public Domain Review about Yaggy’s maps, pop-ups, and 3D diagrams of the Earth’s surface, habitats, […]