The Hand According to National Geographic

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anatomy, art, art lessons, Bryan Christie, Carl Zimmer, common hand, drawing, figure drawing, hand, hand anatomy, lessons, national geographic

In this eight-page article from the May 2012 issue of National Geographic, Carl Zimmer and illustrator Bryan Christie detail the structural anatomy of the human hand, comparing it to similar appendages in other mammals. While we may not immediately think of a flipper, wing, or paw as a hand, these illustrations make you see them in a different light. We keep this article in our drawing instructions and art lessons file now, having seriously botched one too many hands! Perhaps it will help you, too.

puma concolor aeternus

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big cats, Cat, cats poster, cougar, endangered cats, endangered species, mountain lion, national geographic, puma

Mountain lions forever!

Rat Acupuncture!

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Acupuncture, national geographic, rat

Stressed out today? Why don’t you go shove your face in the community sock?

Comics in the Afghanistan War!

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Afghanistan, national geographic, war, war comics

We were reading a blog the other day where the author suggested that comic books are dead. Dude, come on! Marvel and DC may have to re-number their books every week to stoke the sales fire, but comic books as an art form — as a communications medium — are far from dead. Wherever sequential pictures tell a story, comics live! Wherever words and pictures together tell a story more fully than either words or pictures alone, you are getting your world rocked by comics!

We suggested to the author that there’s a comic book in every seat of every commercial airplane. You know, the adventure where the lady puts an oxygen mask on her kid. The comic book where a bunch of people go sliding down an inflatable slide into the ocean. Yeah, that comic!

Later on, we found this page in a 2011 National Geographic. The military was using comics to communicate with people in Afghanistan! It’s pretty simple to follow the storyline on these: The locals tell a soldier where the bombs are hidden, the soldiers round up the bombs, and the locals get paid cash. Hey, DC should try that plot sometime!

Extreme Dinosaurs!

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Amargasaurus, dinosaur, Dracorex, Masiakasaurus, national geographic, Styracosaurus, Tuojiangosaurus

The December 2007 issue of National Geographic featured a ton of cool dinosaur illustrations. While the entire article is worth checking out, we’d like to share with you our favorite illustrations here. This includes a three-page fold out of Amargasuarus, and some great double-page spreads, too. You know how much we love reconstructing double splashes to fry your mind!

Not presented here is the two-sided poster from this issue. But if you can find it, it’s well worth the price of admission. It breaks down the dinosaurs into two groups based on which super-continent they inhabited: Laurasia or Gondwanaland. If you never heard of those before, it’s because they don’t freaking exist anymore! They split up to eventually become our current continents through the miracle of plate tectonics.

Enough science and big words for you there? Okay then! Let’s rock a gallery of these extreme dinos!

Reveals a Pterosaur – With an Egg!

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birth, dinosaur, fossil, national geographic, pterosaur

This month’s National Geographic reports scientists located a pterosaur fossil showing the presence of an egg in 2009.