[Music] [Jane Kim] I am working on the Great Hornbill and this is the final drawing before
it will be painted on the wall. I like to create detailed, polished drawings for each
of the birds before I do them. Once I’ve done it once it’s almost like muscle memory
when I do it again on a large scale, it’s more familiar, so I have an easier time and
I’m not doing much figuring out on the wall. I’m figuring it out here on this scale.
[John W. Fitzpatrick] One of the great things about birds is that they come in so many sizes
and different types of packages. From the tiniest dull little things like white-eyes
to enormous spectacular birds like Great Indian Hornbill, ostrich, and Sunbittern. With this
mural the Cornell Lab and Jane Kim have collaborated to create a truly unique work of art that
provides a visual journey through the remarkable beauty of avian life from the earliest tetrapod
fishes and the proto-dinosaurs through the pre-historic birds to today’s present living
fauna. Jane’s task is to get the details of each bird right. The close details: the
iris color, the behavior patterns, the plumage as she breathes life to them on the wall.
[Jane Kim] Right here, what I’m working on right now, the tip of the wing, in this
small version, I don’t actually really know what the feathers are doing right here, and
I’m just drawing what the colors are doing. But that’s the kind of thing that I want
to find examples either from an actual wing spread wing study, or through better photographs,
how the feathers are actually connecting to the wing. [Jessie Barry] Great. The tarsus
is about 5 inches. [Jane Kim] So it’s pretty good! [Jessie Barry] It is, it’s really
good. [Jane Kim] On this guy, it’s like all white essentially except for the ends
like this. [Jessie Barry] Yeah. So I think you’re going be able to get away with kind
of having this center portion be just kind of a clean white. [Jane Kim] That makes sense.
But maybe if I even just have a direction of a shaft every now and then. [Jessie Barry]
Right, because you really want to nail the primaries coming out of the right spot and
then filling in. [Jane Kim] Drawing out the most fundamental shapes of feathers allows
me to put down shadows and subtleties in the wing that I wouldn’t be able to do without
having taken the time to research that and accurately draw that out to scale. If you
notice on the concept sketch there’s several greyed out birds. And then the entire evolution
is in this grey scale. And that represents birds that have gone extinct but are still
considered modern families. With the Dromornis reading that it was a relative to a goose,
I think his body became a lot more goose-like and he has a very long neck like a goose and
the bill is incredibly different and the legs are very different but overall this particular
rendering felt a lot more natural than anything I had done. They were looking too dinosaur-y.
I love starting with the eye and the head and the beak and then I work my way out. So
once I have that down everything can grow from that and everything proportionally can
be even measured from that. One of the biggest challenges that I’ve faced as an artist
and a scientific illustrator is that struggle of the demand for scientific accuracy vs.
artistic expression. [Jessie Barry] The head feels right, you can bring out kind of this
line of where the upper mandible...and I think maybe…[Jane Kim] I think what I’ve discovered
is that they are two very separate things, so like the accuracy doesn’t take away from
the artistic beauty. So for an example, putting the birds on the map and placing them in their
geographic locations, the fact that they are placed where they belong, somehow makes the
whole composition more exciting. It’s almost that information, and maybe this is exactly
why I am a science illustrator is that the information portion of it is more interesting
in some ways, and has made an awesome composition all on its own. Sometimes I think that the
information and the accuracy sort of shapes the overall aesthetic in this really cool
way, but I guess with birds and their personalities, it’s not about accuracy, it’s about getting
that twinkle in the eye, or having a little bit of an upturn at the bill, because you
decided you can tweak that a little but just to make the bird look a bit happier, or you
can downturn the eye slightly and it’s still accurate but you’ve tweaked it so that it
has something more than just the accuracy. It’s like that’s my artistic decision
making and flair that doesn’t change the overall proportions of the bird. [John W.
Fitzpatrick] One of the really important things to acknowledge about science and art is that
they actually are coming from a very similar, if not the identical, spot inside us, which
is this fundamental curiosity about nature, expressed simultaneously both in science and
art, and ornithology is one of the best places where that comes through.