soft
biology gallery
soft
biology + 252MYA shop
soft
biology redbubble shop
the story of soft biology
While taking a course in Evolution at Bryn Mawr College in 2014, I created the first of many works in the Soft Biology collection, depicting the fantastical, alien-like creatures immortalized in the Burgess Shale, a deposit in Canada containing fossils dating back to more than 500 million years ago. This period, known as the Cambrian Era, is sometimes called the 'Cambrian Explosion,' as it marked a time in history when multicellular life on earth began to rapidly diversify.
Ironically, Cambrian Fauna -- the work I would produce as an homage to the Burgess Shale --would mark a time in my artistic career when I began to diversify the kind of art and design I attempted. At a time when most of my complete portfolio pieces were representational 'studio' artworks and my silly doodles didn't typically leave the margins of my notebooks, this was thoroughly out of my comfort zone.
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Finding myself having recently completed my first 'curio cabinet' of critters, I thought it would be funny to post it to tumblr (my social media of choice at the time) with the caption
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*~** follow for more
soft biology **~*
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in reference to the aesthetic blogs that would post heavily filtered images of random stuff and caption them with something silly like "follow for more soft grunge." At that point I had never had much success online with my art, so imagine my surprise when aesthetic bloggers and paleontologists alike began to share it. It was my first artwork to get a significant amount of attention on social media, and for a small-time artist like me who had rarely seen my content valued on the Internet, that meant the world.
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The enthusiasm with which Cambrian Fauna was received, particularly from people out there on the Internet I'd never even met who shared my love of biology, inspired me to continue approaching biology from a whimsical, approachable perspective in my art.
It also got me thinking: if a lot of people like this, why not turn it into a business opportunity? What if I could have my art printed on a t-shirt or stickers? Would people actually buy them?
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It was at this point I began to start posting my artwork to Redbubble, a print on demand service that would be able to put my artwork on dozens of products and ship them around the world, earning me a cut of whatever profits were made from the sale of my design. I didn't expect to make much, but by some miracle Redbubble decided to feature my work, and pretty soon my sales increased. In 2016, as I graduated from college and transitioned to graduate school, I decided to put my artwork on other print-on-demand sites like society6 and TeePublic, and my sales grew even more.
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In 2018 I averaged around $280.00 a month in sales across several platforms, up from a mere $19.93 monthly average in 2015. I'm not raking in the cash by any means, but there's something incredibly validating about being able to pay for my groceries and utilities with cleaned-up versions of my silly notebook doodles.
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A few months into 2020 I received an email from the founder of Studio 252MYA, a collective of artists and scientists with the unified mission of creating accessible, scientifically accurate art and design for both the research community and the general public. Somehow my art had come to their attention, and I was invited to expand my product lines through the studio's resources and collaborate on new designs. Needless to say, I was super excited (and stuck inside anyway on account of the pandemic) and hit the ground running, and we managed to pull together a line of punny queer dino products just in time for Pride Month.
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The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and since then I've been able to regularly contribute to Studio 252MYA's product lineup with all sorts of eclectic niche weirdness. I've had so much fun drawing everything from funky looking prehistoric sharks and cephalopods wearing Santa hats, and greatly appreciate the 252MYA team (Nick especially) for their patience as I've stumbled my way through rendering scientifically accurate sauropod feet.
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I am so grateful for this opportunity to continue expanding the collection with expert support from a bunch of artsy nerds, and hope to bring you even more quality content in the very near future!
