Introduction
Jordi Corbera, a distinguished Catalan scientific illustrator, has kindly provided us with the first picture you will see (a tiger mosquito) and which serves to introduce the subject of this work: the drawing in science.
Neither photography nor video has made this art redundant. Unlike video images, a scientific drawing is not ephemeral and facilitates a better understanding of all its details. On the other hand, by means of a drawing we are able to see certain structures that a photo image can't show. For these reasons and a lot more, scientific illustration is so important.
Now, let's go on to know how a scientific drawing of a small green plant is created.
Who draws science?
¿How could it be possible to understand the DNA structure or the Neanderthal man features if nobody had ever drawn them...?
There are people who believe that scientific drawings play only a role as a complementary support for science ideas, when actually drawing is an essential tool to improve science understanding. Leonardo da Vinci´s anatomy sketches or Galileo´s moon phases drawings are a clear example of this affirmation.
Anna Barrón, a biologist from the Sciences Faculty of Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), devotes herself to scientific illustration. Nowadays, she is working on a project of the Institut d´Estudis Catalans the objective of which is to know the bryophyte flora of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands. Bryophytes are a group of plants, including mosses that have the ability to revive afterwards become completely desiccated.
Anna Barron
“In order to perform a moss illustration, I use a binocular magnifying glass, together with a white camera fitted to it. A white camera is an optical instrument that allows me to see together the drawing in progress image and the amplified plant binocular image creating one superimposed-image. Thanks to this effect it is like if I were tracing the moss in paper.
Drawing is often very useful. In the case of this particular moss, there are very important botanic details impossible to be “well-shown” by other image-capturer media like photography. In short, drawing will enable us to synthesize and to better unders tand mosses forms and structures.
Once the pencil drawing is finished, we trace it on a cellulose paper using a black ink pen getting a sharper and more beautiful illustration.” “
The moss that Anna drew in this video is in danger of extinction across Europe . So if one (sad) day it becomes extinguished, this drawing could represent the last memory for us of this plant.
