I have loved science longer than I have loved art. I was big into rocks and dinosaurs when I was little and as I got older I had my mind set on being an astronomer. I had little interest in the other domains of science (I actually quite disliked bugs). I enjoyed art, did it for fun but wasn’t passionate about it. Then about 8th grade, while practicing coding I discovered animation. I could go on forever about art and animation and how amazing it is but I’ll skip to the relevant parts.
One of the first things I did when I got here was to try and draw small beetles through a microscope
My interest in teaching science through art is a more recent development and I think the seed was planted when my high school English teacher, senior year, mentioned offhand that I could do art for interactive textbooks but I didn’t think or pursue this idea for the longest time. It was in college, at CCAD (where I am currently a junior), that I started to find my path and what I liked making. As you can imagine, most people studying animation want to go into classic entertainment. And while I never dreamed of working at Disney, I did (and still do) love making silly cartoons but I could never get super passionate about it.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do and how I’m going to do it. For the longest time I didn’t even know what to call this educational animation I wanted to do, and people had a hard time understanding what it was that I was talking about. I’ve recently found the title I think fits best and it is “Science Communication”. But to be a Science Communicator, one has to know science and I, being the stereotypical art student, knew nothing about anything. I was into geology and stars as a kid but I still hardly had an understanding on those topics, and has zero insight into everything else that science encompasses. So, I knew I needed to learn about scientific subjects in order to create educational animation. Not too long after this revelation, I found the OSU Triplehorn Insect Collection and lucky for me, they love (and have a history of) taking on artist interns!
Learning how to mount wasps that were a millimeter long (it was very difficult)
Working at the collection and being taught about the world of insects by all the helpful staff has been overwhelming at times. I failed to mention earlier that not only did I fall in love with art at the start of high school, I also fell out of love with learning science (I’m looking at you Chemistry); the classes were hard and I received my first F’s. So, it was like learning all over again why I didn’t become a scientist. But it was also exciting to see other people so passionate about the tiniest of insects. The students and entomologists are just as enthusiastic about beetles as I am about pencils. I am surrounded 24/7 by people who are all passionate about art and creating, it was refreshing and a good reminder to see people being passionate about other (tiny!) things.
A shot of a drawing I did using the Camera Lucida, an old method used to create scientific drawings before cameras
One thing I was not expecting to learn at this internship was how insect collections work and function and what the curation of such a place is like. Going in, thinking back to it now, I honestly didn’t know what I expected to learn. Probably just the different types of bugs, the orders, genus, etc. And while I did learn a little about that, I learned more about the parts and how they vary species to species. A lot of this came from pinning bugs, something I wanted to kind of do for a year or two now but never really looked into it and it turns out it can be pretty fun (if the bug is big enough at least)!
As the internship chugs along, my hand has been too, drawing the specimens but with no specific plan for an animated short in mind. I still have a lot to learn and discover, especially about the nearly invisible parasitoid wasps. I will be working in the Triplehorn collection until December 2017, researching and consulting with the entomologists about what stories need to be told and figuring out how to tell them so it’s engaging. These ideas will be explored in later blog posts here on The Pinning Block.
About the Author: Jessika Raisor is a Junior Animation Major at Columbus College of Art and Design. You can follow her work on Instagram at @jessikaarts. She started her internship at the Triplehorn Insect Collection in August 2017.