A Hat Full of Sky

Best viewed in 3D on Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/oDOIH

"...the sky was midnight black, shorn of stars. This was the landscape of Tiffany Aching’s mind.”

"On top of a round hill was a four-wheeled shepherding hut, with a curved roof and a chimney for the potbellied stove. Inside, the walls were covered with the yellow and blue wrappers from hundreds of packets of Jolly Sailor tobacco."

I discovered Terry Pratchett's Discworld ~ a couple of years ago. Not sure how it took so long, since I love fantasy and magic.

Truly, better late than never. These books helped me through a lot of the last year. I swallowed a good chunk of the Discworld series, starting with Guards! and Tiffany. Since then I’ve carried in my own mind an image of granny’s shepherd hut as it existed in Tiffany’s head, her hat, and witch herself. This personal work / fanart took a few months, on and off, to realize.

EDIT:

Of course I don't notice the last image is hot garbage quality until its been reblogged a few hundred times. 💀 Replaced, futile though that may be.

Thank you all, I'm very happy you like it!

An imaginary scene about real science: extragalactic neutrinos plunging into the sea & producing Cherenkov radiation - by me via ImaginaryScience

Art by @natureintheory I like mixing sculpting with generative art  🧠✨ For an article about the geometry of thought: Researchers record activity from hundreds of thousands of neurons simultaneously, resulting in high-dimensional data that's hard to make sense of. So they use analogous, lower-dimensional forms called "neural manifolds" to analyze it. For Simons Foundation - Global Brain. Thanks to Emily Singer! — #illustration #3Dart #3Dillustration #3Dartist #zbrush #zbrushsculpt @maxonzbrush #B3D #c4d #cinema4D @maxonvfx #redshift #redshiftrender #redshift3D @redshift3D @nvidiacreators #studioshare @insydium #xparticles #womenwhodraw #stylizedart #scienceart #mathart #scienceillustrator #neuroscience #generative #generativeart #procedural https://www.instagram.com/p/CdXw9rdqu4D/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

New art for @quantamag Thanks to AD @natureintheory Mathematicians Solve Decades-Old Classification Problem By STEVE NADIS August 5, 2021 A pair of researchers has shown that trying to classify groups of numbers called “torsion-free abelian groups” is as hard as it can possibly be. #ericnyquist #math #illustration #drawing https://www.instagram.com/p/CSMx1j1nBbF/?utm_medium=tumblr

NEW PRINT!

A fantastical, retro-futuristic laboratory for black hole research. Originally created for The Institute for Advanced Study – The Institute Letter.

The graphics on the small screens represent real black hole characteristics: Kerr black holes, donut-shaped accretion disks, gravitational effects, binary systems & more.

Credit: Olena Shmahalo for The Institute for Advanced Study

A collection of wearable 3D art inspired by science:

✦ NEW: Wave-Particle Duality Pendant ✦ The Wave-Particle Duality Rings ✦ A Candle in the Dark: Lantern Earrings

Available now on Shapeways!

✦ Shapeways.com/shops/nature-in-theory ✦ Linktr.ee/NatureInTheory

Original designs © Olena Shmahalo / Nature in Theory

Made super-stylized real-time 3D art inspired by one of my favorite creatures in a certain fRPG.

Best viewed in 3D: https://skfb.ly/oOOKv

Sketch → Final!

Cover & spread illustration by Olena Shmahalo for Scientific American, 2022: Black Hole Information Paradox

Related article: Black Hole Mysteries Solved - Clara Moskowitz

In the issue, George Musser covers the black hole information paradox — that information cannot be destroyed, and yet black holes appear to swallow it, leaving no trace when they evaporate. But new research confirms that black holes are reversible after all, conserving information. (the principle of reversibility). Thus the cover concept: a black hole encased in an hourglass. When you turn to the interior spread, the black hole's reversibility is revealed: what goes in comes back out.

Stylized galaxies sketch

This was R&D for a project a long time ago. Since I figured out the process, I've used this style in a number of other pieces.

P5 Report

On December 11, 2023 scientists met at Fermilab to discuss the next decades of high-energy particle physics — the P5 report:

https://www.usparticlephysics.org/2023-p5-report

I got to create the accompanying art: a 3-panel 3D illustration symbolizing subjects in astrophysics & particle physics. One of my favorite projects of the year!

Info, process & more:

Animals!

https://www.olenashmahalo.com/project/animals-2023

Six friends depicted as animals gather around a TV, among ferns, cycads and other foliage: a stylized Tyrannosaurus rex, manatee, Velociraptor, Ragdoll cat, puffin, and Stegosaurus.

One of my favorite client projects this year. It was fun to work on something so different from the abstract, physical-sciences topics I typically take on: macroscopic, biological, and not a sphere in sight! Almost.

Sketches & process:

Here's sort of a tutorial:

How to make a visible mesh / wireframe that's looser than its underlying geometry without being low-poly in Cinema 4D. #C4D

(That's also procedural / geometric / spline-based, not texture, and without expensive plugins.)

Different shapes need different approaches, but the basic setups there will work for similar things.

WHY? For gravitational deformations in spacetime, gravitational waves black holes, wormholes, "Mexican Hat" potential, etc. where you need a smooth shape but don't want a dense wireframe. Examples:

Another way I typically do this is using the Vonc Suite Selections plugin:

These are just some fast, cheap, geometry-based methods. There are other ways of doing this. Using textures is one, but has other drawbacks and issues. There's also another plugin that gets recommended: Rocketlasso's Mesh to Spline; I haven't tried it myself and it's ~$100.

New particle physics jewelry:

The Wave-Particle Duality Pendant

More pictures of the whole collection in this post, and here:

✦ OlenaShmahalo.com/project/objects ✦ Shapeways.com/shops/nature-in-theory

Happy 56th anniversary of the observation of pulsars!

On 28 November 1967, while a postgraduate student at Cambridge, Bell Burnell detected a "bit of scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal had been visible in data taken in August, but as the papers had to be checked by hand, it took her three months to find it.[25] She established that the signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds. Temporarily dubbed "Little Green Man 1" (LGM-1) the source (now known as PSR B1919+21) was identified after several years as a rapidly rotating neutron star.

Nice Q&A with Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/journeysofdiscovery-pulsars

3D art featuring pulsars by me; info: https://www.olenashmahalo.com/project/nanograv

Somebody please hire me* to make a celestial creature xD

These were all unused concept sketches from prior projects. I'm a big fan of Neutrino the Cat, who I hope will be realized in some form someday.

*Half-joking but also not available right now; another busy autumn!

Rebelle 7 by @escapemotions is coming soon! December 14.

I don't do much traditional-media-mimicry in my 2D work, but Rebelle 5 felt so nice even just to draw with. More like real pencil than any other tools I've used over the years (even iPad!)

For example, this wave was drawn in Rebelle 5:

A base for this artwork: https://www.olenashmahalo.com/project/cosmic-neutrinos

Extragalactic neutrinos burst out of an AGN and plunge into the ocean. There, the typically-elusive neutrinos occasionally collide with atoms in water molecules, triggering the creation of third, charged particles. These, in turn, produce Cherenkov radiation, manifesting visibly as cones of blue light. Experiments like IceCube and the newly-proposed P-ONE are configured to detect this emission. For an article about the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) on Symmetry Magazine, by Mara Johnson-Groh: Proposed experiment seeks origin of cosmic neutrinos.

I'm most excited for the fractal upscaling feature from R6!: