The Importance of Enlightenment for Science

What is scientific illustration?

Defining what scientific illustration is and isn't is a very complicated task today, generating long and tense debates between the scientific and artistic community. This problem is caused by the thin line, sometimes almost imperceptible, that separates its artistic and scientific aspects in this discipline, distinguishing it from other modalities within art that allow us to capture the reality of nature with greater or lesser objectivity.

Scientific illustration seeks to represent species (animals, plants, microorganisms,...) whether current or extinct, systems, processes, traces of activity, interrelationships or any other element that can be graphically captured for better understanding.

For this reason, the precision and accuracy with which these images are prepared by the scientific illustrator is crucial to give them the greatest possible rigor. Elements such as scale, textures, shapes, colors, the interconnection of different concepts, details and the absence of them, the appearance of symbology, marks, arrows and texts, and even the arrangement of the different elements that make up the composition become fundamental.

The scientific illustrator

As has already become clear, defining the concept of scientific illustration is a very difficult task, therefore, reflecting in a single definition that is to be a scientific illustrator is equally complex. It could be said that the scientific illustrator is that person capable of combining the scientific need to represent a concept, with the technical capacity to generate an artistic interpretation of it.

Artistically capturing scientific concepts a priori does not seem to be the most necessary thing in the scientific process. If a concept is well explained in writing and is understandable by the scientific community, there is no room for visual interpretation and with a certain artistic treatment of these proposed ideas. But one of the fundamental pillars, in order to be able to assimilate this information by the general public and also by the scientific community, lies in making these contents more visual. The genesis of good scientific illustration is achieved through the joint work between the researcher and the scientific illustrator, who can sometimes even be the same person or different work teams that combine their efforts to achieve the best possible work.

Why not use photographs instead of illustrations?

The difference between the two lies in the fact that photography collects one or more elements under certain conditions and at certain times, while scientific illustration does not seek to copy the reality of an element represented but rather generates an image of the group of individuals, processes, activities or samples analyzed, since normally no two elements of study are exactly the same. The ability to summarize what you want to highlight, reducing the detail or importance of the rest of the elements within the illustration and accompanied by the explanatory text, generates information capable of reaching the reader.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that it is very common when we open a guide, publication, manual or scientific book to stop carefully to see the illustrations that accompany the text, but we don't always stop to evaluate the work that underlies it.

The main problem of scientific illustration today lies in the lack of budgets allocated within the research process to this visual section. Scientific research usually always works with very tight budgetary allocations, which generally do not allocate sufficient resources to this section in their initial approach, if they even want to consider it.

Disseminating science to society as a whole through the most visual and impactful means possible is one of the most important challenges of the scientific process “it's no use making great discoveries that are kept in a drawer”. To take society as a whole and to those scientific fields farthest from our field of study, in many cases “an image is worth a thousand words”, since often “if we judge a book by its cover”.