Science Art | The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Scientific illustration of a spider's face as seen under a microscope, rows of eyes symmetrically arrayed over large mandibles.

Science Art: Eyes of Epeira conica x30, 1884

30 March 2026 grant 0

A spider’s face seen at 30-times magnification, from the February 1884 issue of Science Gossip. This is illustrating a sort of study, or perhaps prose […]

A dark spacecraft firing four small, glowing engines nears a round, rocky planet or planetoid. Perhaps it is Earth. The sun is small in the distance.

Science Art: OSIRIS-REx after SRC release, 2023

23 March 2026 grant 0

This is a still from an animation showing what a larger spaceship does after firing a small capsule toward Earth. The capsule is filled with […]

Scientific illustration of a stand-pipe, looking like a church steeple against a cloudy sky, a tower rising up to help regulate water flow in a black and white engraving.

Science Art: Stand-Pipe, Boston, 1882

16 March 2026 grant 0

A hydrological edifice. As explained in A practical treatise on hydraulic and water-supply engineering: relating to the hydrology, hydrodynamics, and practical construction of water works, […]

Scientific illustration of a heart with several kinds of aneurysms in the vessels surrounding the muscle.

Science Art: Aneurismal dilatation (arteriovenous aneurism)…, 1915.

9 March 2026 grant 0

The full caption of this figure reads “Aneurismal dilatation (arteriovenous aneurism) of branches of coronary arteries in a case of anomalous origin of the left […]

Scientific illustration of a commercially available electric switch from 1905, a lever that creates a connection which turns an arc light on or off, indicating if the circuit is live. It's designed for the mains of a house, I think, or at least for wiring entering a building.

Science Art: Modern Electrical Construction, Fig. 58, 1905

2 March 2026 grant 0

This is a switch for “constant current” electricity to go into a building, a “A modern commercial form of this switch,” is what the book […]

Scientific illustration of a human eye, a blue eye looking out from a yellow skull, the pink muscles attaching it to the optic arch of the eye socket.

Science Art: Eye orbit anatomy anterior 2, by Patrick Lynch.

23 February 2026 grant 0

Unblinking, the lidless eye gazes out from its skull, unseeing. I found this anatomical image while browsing through the “Featured Images” collection on Wikimedia Commons. […]

Scientific illustration of a Kentrosaurus, a relative of a Stegosaurus, pale bones on a black background.

Science Art: Kentrosaurus aethiopicus, by H. Zell.

16 February 2026 grant 0

This is an image from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, a German natural history museum, where they have a skeleton of a stegosaurus relative unearthed […]

Scientific illustration of scopes, scanners, and cathode-ray equipment from the mid-70s, white line drawings on black background.

Science Art: Cathode Ray Tubes, 1974

9 February 2026 grant 0

An image from an ad from the Jan/Feb 1974 issue of the Journal for the Society for Informational Display. The edition is pretty light on […]

Scientific illustration of the saucer-shaped Curiosity Mars probe, a white circle, descending toward the vast reddish sphere that is Mars, spinning around the Sun.

Science Art: Curiosity Approaching Mars, Artist’s Concept, 2012

2 February 2026 grant 0

Is it strange how much this resembles a 1950s comic-book cover about dashing flying saucer pilots? And we made it real, and we sent it […]

Scientific illustration of... well, it's a diagram of the percentage of people who are "doomed" if they don't get a syphilis test in time. The diagram just happens to look a little like a petri dish, and a little like a centrifuge used in medical testing. It's very Art Deco, with Bauhaus-style faces inside the circle and a very Modernist grotesque typeface.

Science Art: Don’t wait – 70% are doomed, c. 1936

27 January 2026 grant 0

This is a poster from the WPA urging people to save their own lives … by getting tested for a sexually transmitted disease. The geometry […]

Scientific illustration of optical equipment studying light in the Early Modern period. Sunlight streams through a window and a board containing a series of lenses or apertures, focusing it on boxes and some sort of cutaway wall.

Science Art: From Les raisons des forces mouuantes, etc., 1615.

19 January 2026 grant 0

This is a light experiment from the 1600s, which I found in the British Library archive over yonder. The book, Les raisons des forces &c […]

A woman with short, bushy hair holds a cylindrical device and smiles next to a headline shouting VIOLET-RAYS! above a scientific illustration of a case of electric equipment that promises SOOTHING, INVIGORATING, CURATIVE VIOLET-RAYS, which are ABSOLUTELY SAFE and GUARANTEED.

Science Art: Violet-Rays!, 1917

12 January 2026 grant 0

This is an ad from the April 1917 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s The Electrical Experimenter, which you can read on archive.org here. I can only […]

A scientific illustration of chicken breeds, in the form of an ornate oval frame bursting with proud and colorful domestic birds - 52 of them, to be precise.

Science Art: The Poultry of the World, 1868

5 January 2026 grant 0

Fifty-two breeds of chickens! This is an educational poster from the 1800s, published by L. Prang & Co., Boston, the makers of “Prang’s American Chromos: […]

Scientific illustration of planets drawn to scale.

Science Art: Diagram of the Comparative Sizes of the Planets, 1895

29 December 2025 grant 0

This is one of the 10 illustrations by Dan Beard for John Jacob Aster’s book A Journey In Other Worlds. Well, actually it’s the one […]

A cell, grey and lumpy, sends out white fibers against a black background.

Science Art: NIH- NCI cancer research

22 December 2025 grant 0

An image of a cell, a neoplasm, from the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine, the “Images from the History of Medicine” collection. […]