A (Big!) Mini-Internship with Ink Dwell

I’m catching up on a lot of things as we all spend extra time at home. I wanted to share a bit about my second (big) mini-internship with Ink Dwell, upon my return from Hawaii in November.

Looking up at Jane’s vision and the InkDwell team’s work, with Amy Koehler. Photo by Deanna Derosia.

Looking up at Jane’s vision and the InkDwell team’s work, with Amy Koehler. Photo by Deanna Derosia.


Ink Dwell was founded by one of my CSUMB professors, Jane Kim, who is a talented artist, and her husband Thayer Walker, a writer. They also happen to be my neighbors. Jane is perhaps best known for her mural work, including the Wall of Birds at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jane agreed to take on me and several of my CSUMB classmates in internships last year, since Ink Dwell had a flurry of projects lined up for the rest of 2019.

When I was due to return home from Hawaii, I had a couple of other art and consulting projects lined up, so I was only available about a day a week to help out. I fully expected to be doing studio work at Ink Dwell’s Half Moon Bay location. But my last week in Honolulu, I called Thayer and Jane and they let me know they really needed more help on their 11-story mural of native butterfly species in the Tenderloin. Having never worked on a mural before, and actually not really sure if I was scared of heights, I asked, “Can I start from the bottom up?” The answer was, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), no. To access the wall we had to climb from the roof into a swing stage, then get lowered down. And most murals are done from the top down, to avoid paint splatters.

At my first test run/safety session at 455 Hyde Street—to see if I could handle it—I was definitely a bit nervous. But once I was on the wall, I kind of forgot how high I was. It was almost like a combination sport and art—a full-body, physically demanding experience. Jane had the whole design and color worked out, so our work as interns was to help freehand the linework, in a grid pattern they had laid out, code the shapes by color number, and eventually, paint them. Way up high, we often had visits from the area’s resident Red-tailed Hawks, and bees who liked to land on the colorful flowers; and we could watch fog and weather sweep across the City.

I learned a lot by watching Jane, which details she pays attention to and where to be looser; her incredible sense of color; and how to see how a full image fits together when you are only looking at a piece of it from a few inches away (looking sideways helps!). It was clear her work is derived directly from a passion for nature.

As I mentioned, I was only helping Jane and the team out once a week, and only on the South Wall—so my role in this whole impressive endeavor was quite small. But jumping into a project in progress, feet first and from the roof, I learned my limits are often farther than I think they are. And every time I drive by the beautiful mural in the Tenderloin, I’ll be proud to say which antennae and wings I played a part in painting, helping people learn about and appreciate all the nature around us in this incredible city.

I’ve attached a few photos here from my short time on the mural. And here’s an interview Jane did with Outside Magazine about this project and her larger body of work highlighting the plight of Monarchs: https://www.outsideonline.com/2409019/monarch-butterfly-conservation-jane-kim


10 weeks in Hawaii with NOAA's Marine National Monuments

Aloha! I’ve just returned from a wonderful 10 weeks interning at NOAA’s Pacific Island Regional Office in Honolulu. The final requirement for graduation from CSU Monterey Bay’s natural science illustration program is an internship in the field. I was lucky to work with Malia Chow and the rest of the team at NOAA Fisheries working on habitat conservation and, specifically, Marine National Monuments. My task was to create a large, “catalog” illustration depicting the Marianas Trench ecosystem and linking to a set of lesson plans for 8-12 graders in the region. The poster will be used in the spring around meetings focused on the Monument’s management plan.

This was my biggest scientific illustration project to date, and I really got a chance to stretch my skills and integrate much of what I learned in the past year at CSUMB. I decided to render the illustration in fluid acrylics, a medium I had only tried in passing, and I really enjoyed working with it. In the gallery of photos, I’ll take you through my process, which started with extensive research, deciding what creatures and elements to include, finding reference photos (largely from NOAA’s own expeditions), and getting feedback from scientists and managers. I’m really happy with the way this turned out. It’s a poster that I would have loved to have on my wall when I was in school.

Wrapping up at CSU Monterey Bay with an Art Show and Publications

It’s been an eventful six months in my life, to say the least, and I realized I was way behind on art updates. June brought the wrap-up of classes at CSU Monterey Bay. The capstone of the in-person program in Monterey is the Illustrating Nature exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. When I began the program I remember telling the director that I had a hard time calling myself an “artist.” Well, nine months of intensive art training and producing more art than possibly ever before cured me of that problem! It was great to be able to display a couple of the works I created this past year while I was focused on learning as much as possible, alongside my extremely talented classmates. I highly recommend putting the next exhibit on your radar screen for May 2020—I know I will try to be there to see what next year’s class has created.

Over the summer I was thrilled to have two of my projects published—my first ever! The first was an infographic about eDNA I created for an article by UC Santa Cruz science writing student Rodrigo Perez Ortega, titled “A World in a Bottle of Water.” The article and infographic were printed by Knowable Magazine in August: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2019/environmental-dna-ocean-water

One of my illustrations I worked on in Jane Kim’s Zoological Illustration class was a project for The Nature Conservancy describing California species reliant on groundwater, for a guidebook for managers. This style of illustration, a “catalog” illustration, shows many species in a typical environment for representational purposes, but at a size and proximity you wouldn’t necessarily find in nature. The Critical Species Lookbook can be found here: https://groundwaterresourcehub.org/public/uploads/pdfs/Critical_Species_LookBook_web.pdf

I feel lucky that while a student I have been already able to get some of my artwork out in the world in service of better understanding nature.

Learning gouache and "trompe l'oeil"

This winter term has been all about color—from colored pencils to watercolor to acrylics and now gouache. (More to come on those other techniques later!) I had never used gouache before this term, though some artist friends had warned me I would love it. It’s a water-based paint, but more opaque than watercolor so you can really build up layers and color.

For this assignment, we had to depict a collection of items in a “trompe l’oeil,” meaning it would fool the eye into looking realistic. That meant it took a long time to get all the details in there—nearly 40 hours on this project. I chose a subject that is important to me, plastic pollution, and it made it easier to spend so much time on it. I’d love to do more work like this in the future.