CYNTHIA COOPER SHAW
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What on Earth has Happened to the Pacific Northwest?
How I started illustrating geology by knowing almost nothing about it
It all started with a new museum with a mouthful of a name - The Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science and Technology - back in 1996 or so, and community businesses were pitching in to make it happen. A mutual friend introduced me to the museum director, who said they needed an exhibit on the geology of our region. Would I be interested in volunteering my time? Wouldn't I like "the exposure"?
Hmmm... well, at the time I was wanting to get back into science illustration after taking off about ten years to raise kids, and my illustration background was biological and medical. I knew next to nothing about geology, other than having a twenty-year old geology textbook around. We were fairly new in town and it'd be a good way to learn about the area and contribute to the community. So I said okay. I was game.
Little did I know the can of worms I was getting myself into. That's often how my life goes (i.e., by the seat of my pants, but then I think of all the adventures I'd have missed had I known what I was getting myself into). This is one of those adventures, and it shot me in a totally new direction.
With any illustration project, I like to start with a full understanding of what I am explaining visually. I soon learned that the Tri-Cities area in the eastern part of Washington State, lies on the Columbia Plateau, which sits atop Ice Age Flood deposits that overlay miles-thick layers of basalt, that in turn overlay old ocean sediments...
But what was basalt? What were flood deposits? What are sediments? How did all those get where they are? What are the processes that led to those processes? And yada yada. I had a lot to learn.
So I dug in, first with the textbooks for a basic understanding. The museum director put me in touch with Dr. Steve Reidel of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who was regarded as the local expert on PNW geology. The more I learned, the more it became apparent that this was all going take a whole lot more explaining.
As with anywhere else, the geologic story of our region all started with plate tectonics. At a minimum, that would take us out to the Pacific Ocean and the Juan de Fuca Ridge. So I dug in deeper and started learning all about that. That was when I became hooked on the geologic story of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) - and on geology in general.
I knew I wanted to do the cross-section through WA and the Juan de Fuca Ridge, but would also want to show how landforms on the surface are expressed by what is under them.
A trip to Olympia to visit the Washington State Geologist (Dr. Ray Lasmanis at the time) yielded a great schematic cross section of WA State that included our region (Pasco area, under the purple arrow), along with a stack of literature to digest.
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(Incidentally, these are images of actual working drawings, complete with artifacts of the project.)
Next step was getting together with Dr. Reidel - and together we filled in more layers and other details on the rough drawings. I needed to start thinking about assigning colors and patterns to different types of rock, and how exactly I would design the mural. Brown is basalt, Yellows and tans are sedimentary rocks. The squiggled lines would be metamorphic rock.
We focused in more closely on the Columbia (River) Basin, which involved plotting an elevation transect using a USGS topographic map (I'll reference that again later, then show you how to do it). I adjusted the vertical scale to match the above drawings. Here I am focusing in on the surface profile of the Columbia Plateau basalts.
A tool we often use in geologic illustration to show detail is an exaggerated scale - in this case, the vertical scale. If we kept the scale as it really was, it would be very difficult to show the various rock layers - but if we stretch things out, we're able to cram in more information that the viewer can actually see. In this geomap, the vertical scale is stretched four times its normal (called a 1:4 exaggeration). It's fine to do that - but important to say that you did it. The horizontal scale for the big mural was 1 inch =11 miles. For the poster it's 1 inch = 7.5 miles. But the exaggerated vertical scale is the same for both (Why would that be? That's a good math question for teachers to ask their students).
After working out the cross-sectional (underground) details, I turned to plotting out the surface (above). This was before there was easy access to satellite Digital Elevation Modeling (DEM) data. At the time, the best resource was the beautiful map by Raven (below) - but I needed to make a 3D surface in perspective - which meant the foreground would be drawn larger than that of the background. That meant plotting out many lines of elevation - a painstaking process that took over a month to do. The straight diagonal lines on the map below indicate where I made each individual elevation transect. At the right edge you can see the points where I started each transect. (Let me know if you're interested in more details on how I did that. It's another great classroom activity for a math-art-science connection.)
Elevation on this map (by Raven) is keyed by color, which I used as a general guide, backed up with a Washington State gazetteer. Note that the lines trend diagonally - that's because the cross section starts in NE Oregon and trends northwest, through Mt. Rainier and up through the Olympic Peninsula (and beyond). We did that to catch the most significant features.
The orange "streambeds" drawn on top are the paths of the Ice Age Floods - another incredibly fascinating story.
Finally, I could start painting on panels. After a couple of months of airbrushing and hand-painting details until I was blue in the face, I was hit with a realization: if I was volunteering my time, I should be using the time to learn the new digital techniques, like Photoshop. (Actually, it was more like, "This is developing into something much bigger than originally planned and I'm going to just give away the original... What am I, totally nuts?")
So I got a computer and a very early version of Photoshop, and one of the first Wacom tablets. I had the panels photographed, then digitized them and resumed painting - this time in pixels. The museum director waited very patiently for awhile - then not so patiently. (But she got over it.)
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I took a lot of flak from husband #1 (and other illustrators) for volunteering my time - and that's still a hot issue in the profession. But on this one I took a longer view: where else was I going to learn current techniques, if not by having a real-world project? Spend thousands on more education while trying to raise kids, or just roll up the sleeves and get 'er done? I thought of it as an independent masters degree project.
Happily, it ultimately paid off in spades, and I've since had a good 20 year-run of a very busy work load in the field. And most of it stemmed from this particular piece of work.
