A simple way to come up with visualisations!

I’ve been wanting a way to show the world’s sea ice area changes in an intuitive and engaging manner. There doesn’t seem to be any way of logically coming up with something like that. No process to go from data to visual that you can rely on. I didn’t sit down with a piece of paper and step through some sort of algorithm, and out popped the barrel graph:

I went for a run and was mulling over repeated annual data going in loops and how the spiral graph was distorted as the ice area was reducing creating cartiod shapes:

Cartiod shapes form when the radius of a sinusoidal plotted using polar coordinates approaches 0. Image source: The University of Georigia

Cartiod shapes form when the radius of a sinusoidal plotted using polar coordinates approaches 0. Image source: The University of Georigia

The shapes are beautiful but unfortunately difficult to interpret and distracting. More mulling and running, and then my mind wandered around other forms of data displays that deal with cyclical data. One that popped out was seismic drums:

Seismic drum at the Lick Observatory, University of California. Image source: Judy Volker

Seismic drum at the Lick Observatory, University of California. Image source: Judy Volker

The drum itself isn’t a good form of data display, merely a way of recording continuous data in a compact form, but it inspired me to come up with the barrel graph!

So, going for a run and mulling over stuff is the algorithm you can apply to come up with new forms of data visuals. Not hard, eh?

But I still wasn’t satisfied, as the barrel graph still takes a bit of interpretation because it’s not entirely obvious what is going on with the rings for the Arctic and the Antarctic and that the top ring is their total. So I’ll just go for a run and mull things over, and something better will come of it!

Right?

Just last week I was sat on the sofa and thinking about circles. Then this popped into my brain, and I made it that very evening:

No running or mulling. Just a sofa and sitting. If I’d known that, I could’ve saved a lot on trainers!

Southern hemisphere hurricane season begins

TheHurricaneBot has been plotting tropical storm paths for a few months now and has transitioned into plotting storms in the southern hemisphere as that hemisphere’s storm season has begun (the storm icon rotates in the correct direction — phew!).

Thank you to everyone who has followed TheHurricaneBot! There are now over 600 followers tweeting over 600 updates, which is quite an impressive ratio!

A future update, now that I am happy it’s plotting Southern Hemisphere storms correctly, will include monthly summaries showing the whole world map with every storm in that month.

I am very pleased with the response to TheHurricaneBot and hope that people will continue to find it informative.

Kev

End'o'summer News!

Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy, 2018

Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy, 2018

Marlo here. We have had quite the week at Pixel Movers & Makers with two pieces of fab news!

It’s been a perfect finale to a summer that has seen us each juggling work, life, occasionally the dishes, and even a little downtime* now and then. (*Neither of us is very good at slowing down even then, it seems.)

Firstly, we are thrilled, extremely grateful, and mightily enthused to announce we’ve received a grant from Ice Alive! Ice Alive has a perfectly mutually-aligned vision, to explore “Earth’s cold places through science, film, music, art, and writing.”

Until now, our efforts have run on weekday midnight oil, stolen weekend hours, Twitter DMs, and deep, driving concern for our polar ice alone. This grant makes a huge difference to our work. The support and generosity of Ice Alive will help us achieve our goals in very concrete ways. Above all, we are so happy to join with others on a mission to creatively show the world the spellbinding beauty, curiousness, and vital importance of our polar regions. 

The grant has also funded my registration fee for the 2018 WAIS Workshop! And therein lies our second piece of super news.

We have been invited to present a poster and our animation progress at the Workshop. We are so happy and grateful to Indrani Das and the other organizers of the Workshop for this exciting opportunity! 

I’m really looking forward to learning more about the WAIS and even more to seeing folks I met at the APECS Antarctic Hydrology workshop in February, too, plus meeting new ice-lovin’ friends. See you there!

Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy, 2018

Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy, 2018

 


 

 

Flights of Fancy

I try to avoid flying unless I have to. Air travel is a large source of greenhouse gas emissions. I calculated my carbon footprint here: CarbonFootprint.com

I try to avoid flying unless I have to. Air travel is a large source of greenhouse gas emissions. I calculated my carbon footprint here: CarbonFootprint.com

Marlo here! I've just returned from a whirlwind overseas vacation. (With some research for the next book I'm illustrating, of course. I can say nothing about this new non-fiction project except that I'm excited to make art about one of my favorite things to draw/paint.)  

In the bare week I've been away, Kev has not only been advancing our Thwaites Glacier animation, but he's been juggling codes and producing a bunch of new animated graphs about the state of our polar ice. Make sure you look through them all, especially the final one, which is a masterpiece. 

Data in creative hands is a thing of beauty isn't it?  

We've also created a Redbubble store. We're excited to offer items featuring our creations, and we'll be adding more very soon. Your purchase directly supports our continuing efforts to spread information about the plight of our vital polar ice. Thank you for your interest and support!

A Very Minke Weekend

Early stages of the minke

Early stages of the minke

Marlo here. I've been in my studio this rainy weekend, making a minke whale for Kev to animate.

Minke whales are baleen whales, meaning they have baleen plates that filter krill and small fish from the water. Despite being the smallest of the "great whales" or "rorquals" (which include humpbacks and blue whales, among others), minke whales are still huge mammals, up to over 10 meters (35 feet) long.

While I was lucky enough to see a minke whale in the Ross Sea last year, I'd never really looked closely at pictures of them until I sat down to paint one. They have rather long faces and such appealing patterning. 

Ready to be digitized prior to animation.

Ready to be digitized prior to animation.

Once I'd made her, I had to disect her...

Then it was up to Kev to wave his magic wand (or whatever mysterious coding alchemy he performs). And by the wee small hours, UK time, he had!

Ms. Minke lives! But now she needs a final touch...

Minke05.gif

Voilà!

There are two subspecies of minke whale: the common (or northern) minke and the Antarctic (or southern) minke. Our minke is the latter. Why are we creating an Antarctic minke? It's one part of the animation we're making about Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, a glacier of such urgent concern that the US National Science Foundation and the UK Natural Environment Research Council have teamed up in a massive project to study it.

THWAITES Graphic2.0.jpg

 

 

Transatlantic Tuesday Night

THWAITES Graphic2.0.jpg

Marlo here. It's been a big week in Antarctic ice news, and it's only Tuesday. Yesterday, the media announced a huge joint project between the US's National Science Foundation and the UK's Natural Environment Research Council to study the Thwaites Glacier.

Studies have shown the Thwaites Glacier is the glacier of most concern. It is accelerating, it's thinning, and it's losing ice ever faster. The Thwaites Glacier is also enormous and contains enough water to significantly raise sea levels. While scientists agree it's in an irreversible retreat, questions remain: how much and how soon? 

Ahead of this news, Kev and I have been deep in preparation both on our animation about the Thwaites Glacier and the graphic above. It's an interesting thing working in time zones 5 hours apart, but as Kev pointed out to me a couple of days ago, he's a serious night owl and I'm a very early bird, so we're on much the same schedule. 

To coincide with yesterday's announcement, we were also interviewed by Brian Kahn of EARTHER. He had seen the Antarctic ice thickness maps Kev made from Antarctic ice thickness data. 

Kev says, "The data was in huge text files of hundreds of megabytes. Literally rows and columns of numbers. I wrote a program that read the files and plotted a grey pixel based on the value found. Never expected it to be so beautiful."

Antarctic ice thickness                                                                &n…

Antarctic ice thickness                                                                                                BedMap2 + Somedudeonasofa

Now, we know the Antarctic glaciology crowd has seen this data in map form before. Perhaps it even becomes humdrum after a while. But to us, it was a moment of pure magic. We continue to be blown away by how exquisite they are.

We've also been thrilled to see so many people engaged by their beauty and asking to know more about what they represent and why we're making what we're making. This is, after all, our mission at Pixel Makers & Movers — to share information about our changing polar ice with as broad and diverse an audience as possible. 

Topography + ice thickness                                                               …

Topography + ice thickness                                                                                        BedMap2 + Somedudeonasofa

BedMap (1) zoom.jpg

Big, isn't it?

 

The Night Before World Penguin Day

Picture1.jpg

Marlo here. I've just come back from my annual NESCBWI conference, which was wonderful as always. I attended my buddy Russ Cox's session on character design on Friday, which really got me thinking about not only character design in general, but the design of our penguins.

Russ, who is a master of character design, had us try a progression of speedy, unexpected drawing experiments, which immediately pushed me to draw in ways I usually don't. They allowed me to loosen up and explore in ways I hadn't considered.

IMG_0034.jpg

Now, these rough sketches may not look like much, but to me what they represent is something very exciting indeed—both for our Pixel Movers & Makers work and for my illustration style in general. My transition from wildlife artist to illustrator has not been speedy or always smooth, so I do need these reminders to step outside my comfort zone—clearly displayed in the image at the top of this post—and remember I also love to make stuff like this:

Picture2.jpg

I hope to create a place in between for our animations.

Now, back to the drawing board!

 

 

Tuesday Night Mad Scramble

The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity for us both. Kev has been keeping himself busy while I prepare for NESCBWI 18. Check out his latest illuminating animation — It's a map, and your home is on it! 

I’ve been readying my postcards and illustration portfolio for this Friday night's Portfolio Showcase, in which art directors, editors, and agents, followed by conference attendees, will have a chance to peruse each illustrator’s portfolio. 

PF.jpg

My big goal over the last two weeks has been to create a new Antarctica-inspired piece. As you may have realized by now, we're both enthralled by polar ice. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between polar ice and the ecology of the surrounding environment (as well as how that ecology acts upon the ice itself), and primarily, how it affects the success of phytoplankton. Among other things, I've been wanting to make a piece that explores the role of icebergs in ocean fertilization. 

I decided to make something showing a simplified food chain around the iceberg, with an informational shape poem about the "life" of an iceberg, from the formation of the glacier from which an iceberg calves to its eventual melting out at sea. 

Last week, I showed you the early stages of that process. 

After a detailed pencil drawing of each element, which I scan, I am using digital oil paint.

After a detailed pencil drawing of each element, which I scan, I am using digital oil paint.

Since then, it's been a race against the clock to complete the illustration in time for my printer to do their thing. (Shout-out to fantastic Iolabs who patiently put up with my last-minute rush every April; thanks Emma!) 

And now for the reveal of the final piece:

Text and image Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy 2018                                                       www.W…

Text and image Copyright © Marlo Garnsworthy 2018                                                       www.WordyBirdStudio.com

Now, it's back to making penguins for Kev to swim and waddle!

penguin.jpg

Note: this post also appears on my Wordy Bird Studio and Polar Bird sites. 

Actual pixel moving

Kev here: After an online, shall we say, discussion about how much of a map showed average temperatures, I felt I needed a really intuitive way of depicting just that. As it became increasingly clear, it's really difficult to eyeball something like this:

gfs_world-ced_t2anom_1-day3018-04-07.png

...and conclusively state that there are more "warmer than average" than "cooler than average" areas, especially when taking into account the crazy distortions of the equirectangular projection. To be fair, the discussion was mainly based on maps using the Kavrayskiy VII projection, which has its own distortions, but I digress.

So what to do? I wanted to create an animation that was short, simple, and intuitive but without involving figures like percentages and square areas, etc. It came to me that it would look cool to see the colours on the map pick themselves up and organise themselves into a column showing their respective proportions.

This would mean I'd need to read each pixel, one at a time, and work out its area, then slide it across and position it in a column. The tool best suited for this sort of thing would be Processing, which is a special purpose animation language.

So, the general idea is that I map (that's mathematically map, not geometrically map) a colour to a temperature value (conveniently, ClimateReanalyzer provides a legend at the bottom with all the colours in it!) and then run through them incrementally finding in the map (the geographical one this time) the pixels with that colour, delete them, and steadily move them at a certain speed and direction until they arrive at the right point. Simple!

Yeah, like I said, "simple."

So, the algorithms I used the most are: one to work out the area of a pixel from the equirectangular projection and one for the acceleration/deceleration motion of the pixel. Everything else was mainly data structure manipulation to remember where pixels are, where they are going to, and how many are already at their destination.

The equirectangular projection, although not the most aesthetically pleasing or the least distorted, has the great advantage that the area of each pixel is super easy to calculate. It only depends on the latitude: you just work out the area of a ring of latitude around the planet and then divide it by the number of pixels horizontally, in this case 1040. 

CodeCogsEqn.gif

As the projection's y axis is merely the latitude, we know how many degrees per pixel (simply divide 180 by the height of the map), so we can easily work out lat1 and lat2 from the y coordinate. Just add in the radius of the Earth, and Robert's your mother's brother.

To make the movement of the pixels as natural as possible, I used what is known as an easing function. The one I chose is the in/out cubic function, which produces motion that looks like this:

cubicInOut.PNG

There are many to choose from, including ones with bounce and elastic motion.

After much experimentation, I created a first draft:

But I felt the single column didn't highlight the near-average colours very well; they were quite washed out and hard to distinguish. With the help of Marlo and her top-notch palette modification skills, we tried modifying the colours so that the bar showed more contrast, but we soon came to the conclusion that unless we went with some quite psychedelic colours, the single bar wasn't going to work very well.

So, I decided to try three bars: one for the "lower than average" temperatures, one for the "average temperatures," and one for the "higher than average" temperatures. As the average temperatures were just one colour, the same animation wasn't going to work very well, so I went with a right-to-left swipe, resulting in the finished article:

Tuesday Night Arting

This is the level of polish I'm heading for in the artwork I'm creating tonight. (See, I just love Antarctic krill!)

This is the level of polish I'm heading for in the artwork I'm creating tonight. (See, I just love Antarctic krill!)

Marlo here. Tonight, I'm taking a different artistic approach to what I've shown you so far. I'm employing a technique I use quite often, including in VOLCANO DREAMS by Janet Fox, which comes out in September.

It's a multi-media approach, and it employs digital tools. First, I spend many hours designing the piece. (I'm not going to reveal that design until the piece is complete, however—one must keep a little mystery before the big reveal. This one happens to have an accompanying acrostic poem—a shape poem—which was very fun to play with.)

Once I have a solid idea and have developed the design, I run it by my critique partners for feedback. I have a great team for that—which includes the lovely, talented members of Team WD (consisting of Priscilla Alpaugh, Julia Ann Young, and Emily Wayne), plus my extremely talented artist mum, Patricia Tremayne, who has taught me so much of what I know. I also run it by my writing crit group, who are talented visually, too, and other family. It's key to get feedback from both other artists and non-artists to make sure everything is working and "reads" well. (Kev actually made a great suggestion on the design for this piece, too, which I was grateful for.) 

Once I've tweaked the design, I draw individual elements, such as this humpback whale. I use a mechanical pencil on Strathmore drawing paper, which I like for its texture. 

IMG_9769 (1).jpg

Then I get them into my computer and start the next—and digital—stage. 

When you're on a tight illustration deadline and you have a publisher requesting last-minute changes, it's great to have each element on a separate layer, so it can be recolored, resized, or deleted, etc. at will. I use both Photoshop and Corel Painter, and I frequently flip back and forth between the two on any given piece. I'm on a super-tight deadline for this piece, so this method is really going to work for me.

Once I have the drawings in, I lay in some color and start to work the piece up using digital oil paint. For SOOOO many years, I wished for a way to combine pencil and oil paint—and with these digital tools, I can! 

krill1.jpg
humpback.jpg

I'm also layering in some real watercolor, just as I did for VOLCANO DREAMS.

Starting to work the krill up a bit...

Starting to work the krill up a bit...

I have four evenings left to finish this piece in time to have it printed ahead of NESCBWI8. So, I must away!