Photography and watercolor have merged in these images that represent the best of both worlds by Fabienne Rivory.

Don’t be intimidated, these ornery ostriches are just watercolor paintings by wildlife artist Dominique Salm

Map art by Emily available in her Keep Creating Etsy store

Illustrator Florian Nicolle breaks down break dancing.

Carne Griffiths makes intoxicating work from actual intoxicants. Using calligraphy ink, graphite and liquids, such as tea brandy, vodka and whisky, he aims to capture “the flow of line and the ‘invisible lines’ that connect us to the natural world”. 

Tropic (Tortuguero) by Ben Blatt

Brain art by Elizabeth Jameson

Jameson on her work:

I work at the convergence of science and art in the study of the human brain. I create portraits of myself and others through the use of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) and the latest advances in neuroimaging technology. With the assistance of leaders in the field of neurology and neuroscience, my images provide new insights into the brain and, at the same time, make medical imaging and its representative humanity more accessible to both medical professionals and others who view these revealing pictures.

My fascination with medical imaging and brain scans has a personal basis. Diagnosed with the disease of multiple sclerosis, I found myself confronting stark images of my brain that seemed equally frightening and mesmerizing. In tackling this contradiction, I felt a strong urge to reinterpret these images — to use them to explore the amazing biological structure of the brain. My current artwork saturates these cold, two-dimensional computerized pixels with rich colors that transform scientific images into portraits of individuals with all the frailties, humor, and idiosyncrasies that make us human.

Peggy Macnamara’s beautiful illustration work comes from her experience as Artist-In-Residence and Research Associate in Zoology at The Field Museum Chicago.

About:

For three decades, Peggy Macnamara has served as the Field Museum’s artist-in residence, spending her time entrenched among the museum’s vast collection of bones, stuffed specimens, and figurines to render them on canvas in watercolor.

Macnamara, who also teaches Scientific Illustration at the School of the Art Institute, originally began drawing and painting in the Field Museum as a hobby. For years, she spent hour after hour at the museum, intricately detailing its displays for nothing more than personal pleasure. Then, in 1983, she was named the museum’s only artist-in-residence, after an employee took interest in her work. Thirty years later, her colorful, life-like paintings of nature scenes have begun to catch the eyes of local gallery curators.

Click here to read more and to see a video about her.

Watercolor and ink work by Colleen Parker.

Botanical artist Susannah Blaxill’s fascination with plants began when she started a small garden at her home. That interest grew into a career when her observations turned into intricately detailed paintings and drawings of the items she pulled from her garden. Now she gardens for her art instead of her table.

Blaxill on her work:

Initially I was most interested in the perfection of bud, flower and emerging leaves. Slowly I began to see the extraordinary beauty in the entire life cycle of each plant and by closely observing this cycle, the next step was to record aspects of this transition from new born radiance to the exquisiteness of old age.

And so I found that the newly opened rose was as beautiful as the dying flower, the plumply fecund pomegranate as magical as the split fruit with its reddish/pink seeds.

It is very true that there is “perfection” to be found within “imperfection”, for as a plant begins to near the end of life, it often reveals itself in a subtly changed form, and becomes once more a subject of supreme beauty. Thus the wrinkled translucent skin of an onion past its prime is as exciting and irresistible to look at as its younger counterpart with those thrilling milky grey-green leaves and plump fresh roots.

As I grew more discerning as a painter, my creative imagination became caught by such ordinary subjects. Of course, not “ordinary” at all. It is rare for people to see the beauty of a beetroot for example, but once set on paper, I find people are fascinated by the complexity and jewel-like quality of such every day plants. It is often in the quite ordinary, humble subject that we as painters and viewers stumble upon the extraordinary. Nature, indeed, needs no embellishment.

Selections from Traffic Jams/Future of Landscape Painting by Terry Berlier

About the project:

These aerial views of dystopias or never-ending traffic jams hint at the future of landscape painting.

You can get lost in the fascinating and amazingly detailed work of Casey Cripe. I encourage you to do so.

Bird in Cage by Paola Pompili

Butterfly Effect is a series by Yuri Laptev based on chaos theory.

About the Butterfly Effect:

The term in the natural sciences, denoting a property of some chaotic systems. Negligible impact on the system may have large and unpredictable effects somewhere else and at another time.

Joanna Barnum has assembled her beautifully rendered portraits of biologists into a 2012 calendar just in time for the holiday shopping season.