Patella vulgata, the common limpet, can be found littering the littoral zone on rocky shores across western Europe (OK, look. I’ve been reading up about intertidal zones and it’s a wee bit like scientists just want to sound smart. Also called the intertidal zone because the tide comes and goes; littoral: near the shore. It’s literally overcomplicated). If you live near a European coast, I suspect you have seen a limpet. They are multitudinous. They don’t look exciting, they don’t move very much. According to my readings they save their mooching about for when the tide is in, because it is easier to move on a mucus trail in the water, then clamp to a rock whilst it is out.

These completely innocuous looking creatures also have teeth that are the strongest natural material currently known to man. (That would be a mic drop.)

It acts a kind of like a conveyer belt and allows the limpet to scrape food (algae and stuff) off rocks. The denticles (teeth) are made from minerals, namely goethite nanofibres, and can withstand upwards of 4.9 Gigapascals. I read over 6 in some places. I also didn’t really know what that meant. But I did find out that structural steel can withstand 0.5-0.8 Gigapascals so limpet teeth are stronger by… a lot.

The tougher-than-everything denticles are embedded in a ribbon of chitin. Chitin is also the stuff that squid and octopus beaks are made from, which, when thought about on an evolutionary level, makes a lot of sense (they’re all in the same phylum, anyway. Did anyone else get a bit geekily obsessed by the Evolution program on the beeb? Loved it). Interestingly though, it also forms the basis for mushroom cell walls (plants use cellulose, further highlighting how mushrooms are not plants, and basking further in mushrooms’ glorious weirdness).

Long story short? Don’t underestimate a limpet. And definitely don’t let it bite you.

Your brain is no exception. Except, that it being your brain and therefore quite important and integrated in the running of your body, its bag has a few layers, each with their own specialised function. There’s also a bunch of fluid and stuff to stop your brain from bonking around loose inside your skull.

(sidebar: “itis” in medical terminology refers to inflammation. Meningitis? Inflammation of the meninges.)

The dura mater, also known as the pachymeninx, is the outermost layer. It’s actually two, one that connects with the skull (the periosteal layer) and one that connects with the internal meninges (the inner meringeal layer). It’s thick, tough and fibrous, and very tightly fused together, except where there are a few spaces to let blood vessels through. Dura mater means “hard mother” or “tough mother” in Latin.

The arachnoid mater (arachnoid - spider. We’re all up in the etymology today aren’t we?! I do love it) is named for its spiderweb-like structure. It’s thin, transparent, and encases the brain and spinal cord like a loose bag. But it’s not attached to either, as it’s surrounded by the subdural space and the subarachnoid space. The subarachnoid space is filled with spinal fluid, and the subdural space isn’t actually a space at all… unless something bad happens like trauma when it can fill with blood. The arachnoid mater has occasional protrusions that poke into the dura mater, acting as a one-way valve for cerebrospinal fluid to pass through.

The pia mater is the closest layer to the brain, and hugs all its contours so you can see all the brain ridges. (I’ve had dresses that do that but I imagine it’s much more favourable in a meninge.) It’s highly vascularised by a network of blood vessels.

And that’s your brain bag! This image is the beginning of a wee series of anatomical images that I’m planning to turn into a new collection of cards. What do you reckon, anatomical cards? What bit of the body would you like on a card?

And next week’s fact, I’m thinking limpets? But I reserve the right to completely change my mind.

The concept: create 100 illustrated seed packets but for mushrooms. Mushrooms have microscopic spores rather than seeds, and are, in fact, closer to an animal than a plant so maybe it’s totally incorrect to even think of them as akin to a seed. Anyway, I’ve got a big list of 100 mushrooms to draw, and I’ve started with my first 11 packets. Here’s four.

You can follow along on Instagram to see them pop up, almost daily (I messed up for a few days and had to do a dump of them all this week, but they’re all going to be there eventually) a bit like mushrooms themselves.

It’s an excuse to try out new compositions and ideas and faff around with real paper and pencils. It’s very enjoyable. I’d love you to follow along!

Now, here’s some interesting tidbits about my favourite ‘shrooms so far.

NB - yes, I redrew the first two of these for this newsletter and yes, that is some of the reason I was behind on my daily mushrooms. But the packet illustrations just weren’t good enough, and I still used paper and pencil! I just coloured them with the iPad in the dark under a blanket whilst hoping amongst hope that the newest Lab Assistant would go the fuck to sleep.

Any mushroom requests for next week? I’m planning a big old post about old mushrooms, and of course, mycelium… Although the latter is tricky to draw in an inventive way. But I’m always always open to suggestions from you lovely lot!

Let’s start with a sidebar immediately so I can tell you its scientific name used to be Helix aspersa, for two hundred years. And then they reclassified it into the genus Cornu. WHY? Well, that is the cliffhanger, isn’t it.

Our wee Cornu aspersums like it cool, damp, and slow. They move using their one big foot muscle (their body, basically), which kinda floats along on a river of mucus they secrete, using peristaltic waves (the same way the muscles in your food-tubes help to move food from your throat all the way to the toilet). The mucus helps protect their delicate foot from sharp things and makes moving easier.

That’s aestivation. Snails are not the only creatures who aestivate, but I wanted to draw snails, so they are my example.

It’s a bit like hibernation, but less intense, they can pop out of it as soon as they sense the weather is a bit more suitable.

I think I might quite like to be able to aestivate, actually, I don’t do well in heat. I don’t know how I feel about making an epiphragm though.

However, if you like these snails I made, which I did enjoy, (how d’ya like that segway?!) they are available as a print, and stickers, on my website…

They were drawn as part of a collaboration with the wonderous jeweller, LuingSmith. We also made engraved, solid silver jewellery, which I’m a little obsessed with. Want a ring or pendant with one of my snails etched on? Email me.

Don’t need prints or stickers? I’m really obsessed with snails apparently, I’ve got cards too…

Now, our next newsletter should be a bumper one, just in time for the new moon, new month, and the start of the 100 Days Project Scotland!

I think the natterjack toad is my favourite, although I have never seen one. In the UK, they have a very small (declining, like all toads) population that’s exclusively coastal and only in very specific pockets. It’s littler than the common toad, and has a very distinctive mating call.

Toads are brilliant. They do that thing where they migrate back to their ponds in spring to breed. They will go regardless of what’s in their way, including busy roads, which is a sad story. Huge shout out to the groups of people who brave the early spring weather to save toads trying to cross roads, you’re amazing.

Also, toad tadpoles are full of toxins that make them taste bad, unlike frogs, and the grown ups carry those toxins in their parotid glands. Clever wee blighters.

This year’s 100 Day Project Scotland will kick off on the first of June, and you know I’ll take part, with every intention of finishing although it doesn’t always happen. A little bird started talking to me about mushrooms again and I have a feeling that is this year’s theme, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, think about buying stuff from my website, yeah? I gotta justify all the new materials I just bought for the project and my new studio…

I have been thinking about how best to fix this. Get back in a habit. It’s a tricky time to do that, as I am writing this at 8 months pregnant and the first Lab Assistant has only just started nursery… even then it’s just one day a week. The Lab Tech (AKA my husband) works full time, compressed hours (as a Lab Tech, it’s the joke that keeps on giving) and two of the days he’s not working I am out managing Harbour Lane Studio. We get one day a week all together, where we try to do something as a family. Plus, I am not the best at juggling four days a week full-on toddler and working - I get a lot of Mum Guilt and like to take him places and give him my full attention. And, if he’s anywhere near a computer he assumes he can watch Thunderbirds on it, so that’s not helpful either. Throw in heavy pregnancy and soon a newborn (albeit ditching the pregnancy part at that point I suppose) and it’s not exactly work soup.

All that being said, I am surrounded by very impressive women who seem to manage just fine. Owner of said Harbour Lane Studio juggles running her two shops, two kids, and manages to illustrate and launch products right, left and centre. She doesn’t pretend it’s easy, but she still gets on with it. And I am obsessively keeping up with another illustrator pal who has a not-quite-3-month old and is already back to taking on editorial work. I can make this happen, I just have to make it happen. I might just have to give something else up. Hours of Netflix come to mind. Getting stuck, pregnantly, on the floor and choosing to just sit there could be ditched. Pointless Instagram scrolling (when I should be telling you all that I still draw things and you can still buy them) is another heavy contender.

So I thought to the times when I was personally most productive. Obviously, when I have a client, it’s a game changer for productivity, but I’m easing back on client work for the time being because I cannot imagine what having two kids is going to be like. Until I know how well I can fit work around them, it feels safest to commit to my maternity leave and not run the risk of letting anyone down or potentially missing deadlines due to someone throwing up on my iPad, or whatever.

Enter the 100 Day Project. Followers may remember this is something I tend to (at least attempt) do every year, it starts in June and runs for (funnily enough) 100 days. You show up the same way every day, and do something creative. Last year, I made stamps. In 2023 it was abandoned but I managed a few drawings I was proud of, each taking no longer than 20 minutes. In 2020, it was anatomy posters. They were some of my favourites, and I enjoyed having a focus to my personal creativity, something to bring me back and make me show up regularly.

I started and faltered with my hundred day project this year, and now the official project has finished. So I’m going to make my own. 365 days though*. By the time I’m finished I should have a 10 month old, a nearly-four year old, a purpose-built studio that is currently my garage and hopefully, a more consistent personal practice. Here’s the rules:

• I will make (at least) 30 minutes in every day* to draw. And no, I am not committing to a fully-fledged, polished illustration every time: it might be a sketch, it might be colouring something I drew a previous day. But it will be a visually obvious bit of illustration. I'm rustling up a template in brand-new-Affinity so it’s nice and clear what I’ve done. If I have more than 30 minutes, I will draw something longer, but only in 30-minute increments. Hence, incremental illustration.

• I will share my 30-minute-feat on Instagram, daily. Because I can’t think of anywhere better at present. I guess I can use the Substack Notes too, so watch out for them there!

• I will share a weekly round-up in Substack. At least one of the illustrations will make up that week’s weekly fact. I guess I hope there will be a series for the week that’s all cohesive, but that’s not always going to happen. Anyway, it will get us back into routine on here too.

• Each piece will be either anatomical, naturally historical, or part of an A-Z of sciencey things. I’ll explain more about that last one as it evolves, but basically I need art for the kids rooms so I’m adding an A-Z poster project into the challenge.

• I am going to use the project to explore new techniques and processes which I hope will keep things fresh, but allow me to continue cementing my illustrative style which I feel a bit out of sync with, I blame pregnancy twice.

• I’m going to limit each piece to a maximum of three colours. Because the tighter the brief, the easier to not make excuses. And if I’m trying new techniques I need to be limited somewhere else.

OK, that’s the rules, and the project.

I know I start a lot of projects with a big announcement like this and then fail to see it through, but I really have thought about this one, and I’m fully committing. I have an accountability buddy (one might say, the BEST accountability buddy) who’s going to poke me with a very long stick (she doesn’t live near me, unfortunately, so it’s VERY long) if she doesn’t see my posts on the regular. And I committed myself to the very impressive Isla who runs the 100 Day Project Scotland too. She is expecting me to join this project in with 100 Days 2026 when the time comes around, so I’ll need to be practiced, prepared, and have a wee chunk of a hundred somethings to run through in June next year.

I’m going to start with a series on Organs Involved in Pregnancy and Labour because that’s where my head is just now and I feel like there’s a lot that goes unsaid about what’s involved there. Like, it took me an upsettingly long amount of time to find out the specifics of what actually happens during contractions, and we don’t really talk about the physical changes in your brain (oh, baby brain is not just made up, but it’s also a lot more complicated and person specific) and I feel like I might have to do something on the sciatic nerve because this new kid is sitting on mine and my arse is KILLING me.

So, follow along here, weekly (or if I remember to use Notes) or over on Instagram, keep me showing up if you would be so good. I’m off to rustle up today’s, so if you are reading this on or after the 7th November 2025, you can go try and find it!

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One final point: whilst I might not use it every time due to fear of waking one of the far-too-many children, I do have an actual egg timer prepared for this.

*I reserve to take a few days off surrounding my actual labour, but I am going to try and prepare for that by having something in the bank.

Take a deep breath. Your diaphragm is moving, squeezing your lungs or allowing them to expand, and draw air in, or expel air out. Your lungs are full of branching tubes (called the trachea at their largest, getting smaller to become bronchi and yet smaller still to become bronchioles before they end in microscopic alveoli, which handle the exchange of gases in your bloodstream), kinda like a bag of wormholes. These bags live in their own bag, which in turn is made of two bags, so that your lungs can slide around in their double bag and expand and contract with basically no friction because, imagine. That would be bad.

Your lungs might develop while you are an embryo, but you’re floating around in fluid so they don’t start to work until you’re born and hit air. No wonder newborns are so snuffly and sound like they’re having a terrible time breathing - they’ve literally never done it before. And you can’t talk them round to taking deep breaths and getting the hang of it because they’ve never done anything before, so they don’t understand.

Another deep breath: your left lung has a chunk out of it because your heart sits there. Your lungs wrap around your heart, because the two organs need to work closely together to make sure the blood gets into the lungs so they can exchange the gases and the lungs need to send the blood back to the heart so the heart can make sure it gets to the rest of your body. It’s a lovely relationship, all teamwork and hugs.

And one more with me: pregnancy restricts your lung capacity, because you grow a bloody huge extra organ that holds a massive baby (ok, maybe my adjectives there are coloured by my current predicament) and reduces the space for oxygen exchange. Pregnant right now, or ever been pregnant, and noticed you felt short of breath even before the baby got massive? Yeah. Progesterone is in high levels during pregnancy - it’s all very important for growing a baby - and those high levels make you breathe faster. Because you’re just a vessel now, you don’t need time to get work done or space to think or air to breathe. You are growing another person, which means you have grown the magical powers that enable you to do everything you did before, with considerably less time and brain power and lung capacity. This is a wonderful adventure.

Let’s take a deep breath.

Everything is going to be brilliant.

Parallels III opens on the 26th September in Coburg House; I will be the enormous pregnant lady who somehow managed to pull work together and put it on the wall, alongside three significantly more put together artists whose carefully considered pieces will be on display alongside mine. See you there? We can do big breaths together with our spongy heart-huggers.

One of my favourite things to do is to draw the overlooked, or really common animals that are just as awesome, but don’t get the same amount of adoration because we see them all the time, and forget to bask in their wonder. And in this case, I had an enabler to get drawing, in the form of Fiona Luing, the phenomenal jewellery designer behind LuingSmith. Together, we have created a series of prints, stickers and the most amazing illustrated jewellery featuring a trio of oft-overlooked garden insects. The illustrations detail a Garden Snail, a Seven Spot Ladybird and a Common Carder Bee. We discussed the Seven Spot Ladybird in a previous post, so today we’re going to do a quick squint at the Common Carder Bee.

It’s a fluffy, orangey/gingery wee bee (about 1.3cm to be exact), and you can find it basically anywhere in the UK where there are flowers. They’re social bees (not like the solitary bees we talked about in this post), which means they nest in a little colony of anywhere up to 200 workers. Queens hibernate over winter, emerging in spring to lay eggs which hatch as workers and keep the nest ticking over and going like clockwork. Later in the year, male bees are born, and they mate with any new females who will be prospective queens. In the autumn (the common carder bee is active until as late as November if there are flowers to feed on) the workers, males and the old queen die, while those new prospective queens hunker down and hibernate, ready to kick off a new year with gusto.

In addition to being one of the less-common species of social bee here in the UK, the Common Carder has a really long tongue, so they can feed on flowers with tubey shapes, like the lavender pictured in the print created for the Garden Variety Collab.

Once I’d created the above illustration, to be made into a snazzy A5 print and a sticker, I scaled one of the wee bees right back to a much more simple, vector line drawing. The talented Fiona then took the illustration to be engraved into one of her amazing, chunky, recycled silver jewels, and you can see the results in the images below.

The prints and stickers are available on the Lab Shop now, the jewellery is much more limited but available through LuingSmith. Together, we’ll also have a wee showcase of these pieces (and more, so much more) at our Parallels exhibition, opening at the end of September for a very limited two weekends. You can find out more and sign up for news via Parallels.

So in this study, researchers tweaked a pig embryo so that it grew with human heart cells (in place of pig ones) which developed as they would in a human. The embryos survived for 21 days, by which time the tiny embryonic heart had started beating.

Now when I stumbled across the study I had reason to be extra interested again in human embryonic development. Plus, it reminded me of now-very-old client work I created to help explain embryogenesis (developing into an embryo) and I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a deeper dive into what it takes to grow a human heart. In a human, not in a pig. Although, that’s pretty cool…

When is a Heart a Heart?

As you grow from a single cell into a fully-fledged, multi-cellular, complex human, your heart is the first organ to develop. It starts off as a little cluster of cells that can start beating at around 22 days* into the life of an embryo (*My research threw up a wide selection of timelines for this; I think we are discovering heartbeats earlier and earlier as technology evolves, but I might have the exact timings a little off. Anyway, the heart starts beating within the first month or so, which is fast, considering how everything else is still very much blobs of similar cells at that point). And that little cluster of cells will grow and develop into a fully fledged, pear-shaped organ that will keep beating, constantly, throughout the entire lifespan of that human.

How Do You Get a Heart Anyway, Ask a Wizard?

Embryogenesis is the stage of human development where a newly fertilised egg turns into an embryo. This stage takes about 8 weeks, after which the embryo officially transitions into a foetus. I believe there’s 23 stages during embryogenesis, and I will not try to list them all, we’ll stick to a brief overview I think, so your head (and mine) doesn’t explode.

During embryogenesis, the little embryo grows itself limbs, a head, rudimentary organs (liver, heart, kidneys, brain, lungs…) and it starts all this by splitting from a single cell, by mitosis.

Extreme sidebar - does anyone else remember that episode of 90’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch from before the internet was a thing and I could look up what mitosis actually was?! I think the joke was they did explain it at the end of the episode, but I always felt left wanting. So here we go: mitosis is a process of cell division where one parent cell splits into two identical daughter cells. It’s how you get more cells with identical sets of chromosomes so it’s very helpful during reproduction.

Following the first round of mitosis, we’ve gone from a single cell (zygote), to a ball of cells (a morula), to a ball of cells with distinct separate cell types and a nice big space for growing stuff (called a blastocyst) to a flat disc, which then grows a little indent (primitive streak) and starts to fold in on itself into more of a bean shape, then it starts to grow a head and arms and legs and a heart and look like a tiny person and stuff. There’s actually a whole section where the embryo isn’t much more than a folded over tube with a slightly bigger blob for its head, but it does have an extra, almost external, blob for its heart. You can see that in my very vintage illustrations above.

After embryogenesis, there’s a bit more growing and cell division for a while… and then nine-ish months later, you get a baby. Easy, right*?!

*I can confirm, having just reached the halfway point in growing a second Lab Assistant, that no, it is not. Did you notice a three month gap in this weekly newsletter? That's because I spent it throwing up or asleep. I may still be asleep. I am hoping, however, that this newsletter will be the start of normal service resuming. Aside from being kicked internally on the regular and suddenly struggling to fit through sizeable gaps, the dreadful early-pregnancy symptoms seem to have abated.

In Parallel

In exactly 5 weeks, myself and three other absolutely fabulous creatives will once again be exhibiting together for Parallels III: a group exhibition showcasing the work of Anna Gormezano Marks, Fiona Luing, Jenni Colquhoun (me) and Solii Brodie.

After meeting professionally seven years ago, the collective makes time to come together annually and showcase our ever-growing bodies of work as each progresses through the years. This will be our third exhibition held at Coburg House, opening on the 26th September for two weekends. We've got a little more information online at parallels.work, and we'll be releasing more as we have it. But if you're Edinburgh-based and would like an invite to our private view, please, drop me a line! I’d love to see you.

Rest assured, I have been keeping up my 100 Days of Notes from the Field, I just forget the final stage… sharing… but the whole point of a hundred day project is to build (rebuild, in this case) a habit, so I will get better, I promise!

Garden Adventures

We’ve not been exploring very far afield this week, mostly in our own front garden (we = me + the Lab Assistant a.k.a. toddler. To be honest, there’s little that gets done without him at the moment). But it has been an absolute delight, as we have encountered an absolute glut of ladybirds! We’re also keeping an eye on a very large poppy, and enjoying spying the bees.

The Seven Spot Ladybird

The seven spot is our most common ladybird. Assuming I’m counting correctly, that’s what’s taken up residence in our front garden, which is a burgeoning wildlife meadow that I’m very proud of even although I had nothing to do with its existence and actively avoid involvement in its maintenance.

I did not know until a few years ago that ladybirds (and all beetles. All of them.) start out as a terrifying-looking larva. There were loads of them in our garden the first year we moved in to this house and I was concerned we were infested with something truly horrible… but then they all congregated on a brick wall, pupated, and we had enough ladybirds to keep our aphids at bay and it was glorious.

Adult ladybirds hibernate over winter, sometimes all clumped together in a wee group. They like hollow plant stems, curly dried leaves and insect boxes, as if you needed another reason to install one. When they wake up, in Marchish, they lay eggs, which turn into those evil-looking larvae. They go on to pupate and emerge as fully grown ladybirds, ready to take on the summer, tasting horrible to birds and excreting a disgusting-tasting yellow substance (a form of controlled bleeding from their joints) if they’re really threatened. They eat primarily aphids… but they will eat a selection of other insects, eggs and larvae too, also the occasional bit of pollen and nectar.

Lastly, one for my beloved accountability buddy, these shiny little gems of a beetle are the designated national insect of Finland.

The illustration is taken from a print created in collaboration with Luing Smith (there is the most amazing jewellery that accompanies it). I have a wee stash of digital prints and stickers which will be listed on the website as soon as I find the time, but you can always get in touch if you’d like one before I get them up there.

Lastly, if you made it this far you get to know that clockleddy is Scots for ladybird. I do not know the etymology for the Scots but their scientific name is Coccinella (septempunctata, for the seven spot) which comes from the Latin coccineus, meaning scarlet.

What's a Hundred Day Project, then?

The hundred day project was conceived (I believe) by Michael Bierut for art students at Yale School of Art. The idea is to do one, small, creative act every day for 100 days. It has to be something you can keep repeating, ideally with a slightly different outcome, that you can track in some way over and over. By the end of the project you will have done your task 100 times. So you might have 100* anatomy posters, 100 stamps featuring your work, or something a little more vague.

*I did this project, and no, I didn’t get to 100. So, 100-ish.

Why is this in a newsletter about facts?

I have started a 100 Day Project every year since 2018. Last year, 2024, was the first time I managed all 100 days since that first project back in 2018. The most successful one (I think) was my 100 Anatomical Days project in 2020. I made about 80 or so anatomically themed rough drawings for posters. It was a lot of fun, but it took a good hour or two (at least) every day. It was during the pandemic, so that was possible, but as you might be able to tell by the fact that there are not 100 posters, the pandemic ended and life came back and there wasn't enough time to finish. This year I'm desperate for a creative project, but incredibly short on time and brain capacity and energy and I will still be bringing you your weekly (mostly) fact, so I've got a cunning plan.

100 Notes from the Field

For 2025’s hundred day project I'm going back to basics with observation. 100 days of “field notes”, if you like. When I was studying animation the tutors impressed on us the importance of observational drawing. It makes you better, gives you the chance to play a bit, and by observing real life you’ve got a great mental and physical bank to draw from… in more ways than one. Keen to get back to building on that, I’m going to use this year’s project to make it habit again. I have realised that I might not get time every day to whip out my sketchbook every day (but I’m hoping by doing this… I’ll make more of an effort to) so I’m extending the scope to include reference images and video I have captured too. I often find myself taking pictures to look up/draw from later, and forgetting I did it, so this way I’m forcing myself to document, and keep track of what I document.

Long Story Short: What You Get

I will post a reference image, be it sketch or drawing or photo or video every day over on Instagram, creating a 100 days bank of Field Notes. I’m not sure what will come of it, but if nothing else I’m hoping to reinvest in my observational habit. You are very welcome to follow along on Instagram, but I’ll also do a weekly “summary” for this newsletter. My hope is that I manage to find some theme to tie the reference images together with, and we can learn some cool facts based on my weekly observations.

To get us started; here is the image from day 1, a still from the shaky video I took of what I think is a Little Tern. They’re apparently fairly common around the firth of forth in summer, and the UK’s smallest tern. This one was having a whale of a time.

This drawing is from 2020.

It was part of my 100 Day Project that year, and, as you might assume, I had more time to dedicate to the project because I was trapped in my house (lockdown, remember that?!). I have since tried several, equally ambitious projects, and never managed to get quite so far. Something to be said for dedicated time and a deadline.

I tried to redraw this image for you and tidy it up a bit but it just looked a bit crap. Cue me panicking that I’ve lost it, but actually I think it’s the speedily drawn nature of this drawing that lends the life to it and makes it that wee bit more appealing. Cue me panicking that spending ages making a perfectly finished image sucks the life out of it… but then, that is the kind of panic that regularly keeps me up at night, so maybe it’s something I need to work on!

Extrinsic hand muscles. Ex = outside: the muscles all live in your forearm and their tendons feed into the hand and help it make big movements. We’re talking grabbing, waving, twisting, with grabbing being the major one as it’s made us that very successful species we talked about last week.

So I’m grabbing this opportunity for a very speedy, quick and dirty fact, but the chance to revisit a picture I really liked but didn’t get enough airtime first time round.

Got a fact suggestion? I’m coming towards the end of my latest batch of ideas so I’d love you to fill the comments with things you wanna know…

These are the muscles that let you… oppose your thumb(?! is that how you would say that? I can’t be bothered to look it up guys; it’s been one of those weeks) amongst other tricky little hand movements. By the way, in case, like me, you didn’t really know what an opposable thumb actually means (always just assumed it meant a sort of thumb-waggling motion but in all honesty I didn’t think much about the definition of the individual words involved): it’s the ability to touch your thumb to an opposite finger, allowing, amongst other things, making a grasping motion. As in, we can grab stuff, and wield it around largely without dropping it = successful species.

Your hand is capable of very intricate and precise movements. It’s how we can use a keyboard, a phone, play the violin, paint, draw, sculpt, sew, knit, do up the buttons on your jeans and poke other people in the eye. All of these carefully controlled movements happen because of the intrinsic muscles of the hand (called that because these are all little muscles that start and finish inside the hand boundary, and act to help move the bones in your hand and nothing else).

The intrinsic muscles are split up into three groups, thenar, hypothenar and intermediate. They all act on different hand-parts. The are four thenar muscles which act on your thumb (I’m not going to list the big Latin names. I actually find muscle naming quite fun because it often just explains what the muscle does and where it sits in your body, but in Latin, but for the purpose of this brief newsletter I think we’ll keep it simpler). The thenar muscles form the “ball” of your thumb, or your thenar eminence, if you will. Then you have three hypothenar muscles that act on your little finger and form the hypothenar eminence (the ball of your little finger, that squidgy bit at the base there). The intermediate muscles (or midpalmar) act on all your digits, except the thumb. I’ve illustrated the superficial muscles here, but there’s another (deep) layer (like a second layer on a chocolate box but with different chocolates) which are just as important to movement, but not as fun to look at, so you just get the best, top chocolate layer.

You can also make big, powerful, but crude (by comparison) hand movements, and these are controlled by the extrinsic muscles of the hand. But they’re a topic for next week. In the meantime, here is a lovely print that shows a wonderful example of delicate hand movements and quite a good example of opposition.

Octopuses need these three hearts in part because their blood is blue. Unlike us, they use a copper-rich protein called haemocyanin to transport oxygen in the blood, making it blue. We use haemoglobin, which is iron-rich, and red. Haemocyanin isn’t as efficient at transporting oxygen as haemoglobin is (under the sea life just seems so hard, I don’t care what Sebastian says) but it is more efficient in cold and low-oxygen environments, like the ocean, so the two branchial hearts help to boost the oxygen absorption.

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Octopuses are cephalopods, coming from the same family as squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses. Cephalopod literally means Head Foot, I believe in an attempt to verbally illustrate their “bodyless” anatomy. The octopus’ head branches off right into its 8 arms, and behind the head is what I guess would be their body (called a mantle) but looks like more head and holds all their important organs - the three hearts, eyes, stomach/digestive organs, sex organs, lungs/gills, and their main brain. The central brain is doughnut shaped and wraps around their oesophagus, and then they have EIGHT MORE brains - one to control each arm. Each arm can do its own thing - touch, taste, move without direction - but can also be controlled by the main brain when needed. This means the octopus can do things with their arms much more speedily and efficiently, which makes sense. I have enough trouble with two arms, imagine having to think about what to do with eight?! Fortunately, they don’t.

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Potatoes are a huge part of our lives (the Lab Assistant has become very eloquent in his pronunciation of “chips”, usually followed by “sausis”. I swear I feed that kid healthy food but that dish is the one that stuck) and if we hadn’t cultivated them from a single origin somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, I can only wonder what we would eat instead.

Potato plants are perennial (they come back every year… for two or more years) and herbaceous (they don’t have sticks that stick around in the winter) and they use the potato part to store energy for the plant. The potato is not a root, but is in fact a modified stem, much like how a breast lobule is a modified sweat gland I guess.

You get wild potatoes across the pond in the Americas where they originated, now spread from the southern United States all the way to southern Chile. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of wild potato varieties that grow all over the world now, but I have it from a bunch of reliable sources that that’s their home. They were domesticated from a single species, which if I understand correctly would have been one of twenty or so morphologically similar species that make up the Solanum brevicaule complex. As discussed previously, plants are not my strength, so do clarify this in the comments if I have it wrong, but please, for the sake of a poor artist whose fingers were designed to hold pencils and haven’t a hint of green anywhere about them, be gentle.

I can’t think of a clever segway into this next bit of news because I really need a holiday, and fortunately, I’m having one. We’re off to Arran for a Big Birthday Celebration (not mine) next week, and I wanted a creative endeavour for my holiday. I’ve decided to try and fill a wee pocket sketchbook with observational drawings and working ideas (field notes?) so I will share a few of my favourite pages with you in the next newsletter. If you are a gorgeous paying subscriber you can flick through the whole thing with me, plus we’ll get this month’s digital download, which is very thematic with next week’s fact. It might be a bit of a later newsletter next week, what with the whole getting-on-a-ferry and being-on-a-different island thing, but I’m quite excited about next week’s one and I think it will be worth an extra wait.

Meanwhile, enjoy your tatties!

OK, so I obviously favour a bumblebee myself. We have 24 types of bumblebee in the UK and I am rubbish at telling them apart. “Easily identified by…” is what all the bee identifiers say and I just get grumpy reading that, because when a bee is going about its business, I don’t think it’s easily identifiable in any way. It’s not going to hang about on that flower/leaf/your toddler for long enough for you to decide if it has a red tail or an orange one. How many stripes? One, two, shit, it flew off. And bumblebees do nest in colonies, same as honeybees. We’ve only really got one species of honeybee in the UK and it was introduced by beekeepers. Apparently there is a native one, but you’re very unlikely to see it in the wild. And if you do, could you really tell the difference before it flew off anyway?!

So, bumblebees and honeybees make up about 10% of our bee species. The other NINETY PERCENT are solitary bees, who make their nests underground, or in handy wee holes or snail shells and other such crazy places. They make little chambers for their eggs, then seal that off and live in a different wee part of the house. Since I personally can’t remember the last time I even got to go for a wee by myself, that sounds ideal.

Solitary bees are pollinators too, very effective ones. OK, so you get the odd cuckoo or parasite bee which lays its egg in another bee’s house and then lets them do all the work while their grub eats the hosts baby… but on the whole, all these solitary bees fall hard under the “excellent pollinators” category. And they don’t really look like bumblebees, but they might look a bit like honeybees… in case you have better eyes than me, and happen to be a paid subscriber to this newsletter, I have a few for you to take a gander at just here.

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Neep is part of a series of three prints. It can be paired with a tattie and a haggis, and yes, I will do a feature on all three, hold on to your butts for the haggis. For the neep, I wanted to test out my abilities as a botanical illustrator, and, full disclosure; it’s not my favourite branch of scientific illustration. I’m not that mad keen on plants and there are many splendid botanical illustrators out there. I decided I prefer cells and bodies, myself, but I do enjoy a planty break on the odd occasion, just to mix it up. If you are not familiar with Scottish fare: haggis, neeps and tatties is our trademark dish. We’ll go into what haggis is in a later post but suffice it to say it’s traditionally mashed up leftover sheep, tatties are potatoes (also mashed in this case. Or champit if you like, which means mashed) and neep is turnip (also mashed). The problem arises when you ask what a turnip is, because that’s where the waters get muddied… and I might have made a mistake.

If you go to the shops in Scotland a turnip is a big, yellow-fleshed root vegetable. The skin is sometimes purpley at the top where the leaves are, and fades to whitish by the tip of its root. I believe that almost everywhere else this vegetable is called a swede. An actual turnip is smaller, whiter, and rubbish, and you definitely couldn’t carve it at Halloween as an alternative to pumpkin (although I have never successfully carved a neep-swede either so…) Would you like to be further confused? Cool, read this Guardian article which I feel sums up the whole situation beautifully.

So when I went to draw the neep, I was, as mentioned earlier, very young, and a bit naive, and I drew a turnip. But I drew what everyone else thinks a turnip is (brassica rapa) and that is not what I would eat as a neep (brassica napus). However, is it wrong? Because it is a turnip. Which is a neep. Just maybe not the one you’d traditionally find on your plate with haggis and mash. Also, I am still quite proud of my wee turnip, and he looks great beside the tatties and the haggis. Always endeavouring to get the facts right though, I have been reworking the classic HNT print triptych, and one day I will relaunch them, with this here “proper” neep.

If you want to be the first to know when that finally happens, you’re going to want to put your email address in that box up there, just sayin’ . And if you want to tell me that the new illustration is “wrong” too… Please do. I genuinely want to hear all the neep chat.

My biggest issue is that I used to be quite proud of my boobs (not that I actually remember what they looked like now, but I’m certain I was) even though I had absolutely nothing to do with their creation, existence or function. And, now that I have used them and they have fulfilled their life’s purpose and proven themselves to be excessively functional and practical, I’m embarrassed of them. I lock them up in an expensive, uncomfortable, complicated contraption because society says I should (but also because they don’t sit where they used to and I might trip over them if I didn’t) and wear sack-based clothing to try and make it look like they might not take up as much space as they actually do.

So let’s take a look at a boob, shall we? Let’s marvel at how wonderfully functional and practical and useful they can be, in an attempt to rethink any negative feelings toward them. Maybe you feel similar to me, maybe you’re just getting ready to use yours, maybe you never plan to, or they’re giving you problems, causing you grief, pain, illness, or maybe you don’t have any. However you feel about boobs, it always helps me to arm myself with knowledge; join me in taking a closer look.

So, your boobs project out from the pectoralis muscle, actually using your muscle as an anchor for the boob’s dense irregular connective tissue - which is the stuff that sits under all your important boob structures. There’s also a lot of adipose tissue (fat) and a fair few strands of connective tissue called fibrocollagenous septa or the suspensory ligaments of Cooper if you want to be boring (named after the surgeon who described them, Astley Cooper. I prefer septa). The septa weaken over time or size changes (like expanding to produce milk or because cake/beer/bread and butter is amazing) and Cooper coined a “droop” to explain breast sagging (ptosis. It’s called ptosis. Why is that seriously fabulous term not more well used?!) and related it to the septa. Of course, since he described them. However, the saggy boob phenomena that is ptosis has been shown since to be largely caused by genetic factors and significant changes in size that come from things like pregnancy and weight changes. Anyway, now we’ve all basked in the glory of ptosis, the rest of your boob is mammary gland.

Mammary glands are modified sweat (sudoriferous) glands (ew) which produce milk as part of the lactation process. The rest of the process is secreting and ejecting the milk. It’s not particularly glamorous, but if you are feeding or have fed a small baby, the idea that you have grown and kept a human being alive using just your body is quite a powerful feeling, one I must remember while I try to forget that my boobs are grazing my knees. The mammary gland is made up of 15-20 lobes, which themselves contain lobules, which in turn contain “grapelike” clusters of the milk-secreting glands called alveoli nestled in connective tissue. Little cells in the connective tissue contract which help squeeze the milk out of the alveoli and into a series of tubey things, ducts, and sinuses which carry and can store the milk slightly temporarily until it is expressed from the lactiferous duct out the nipple and into the baby. Or breast pump, if you have a difficult baby like I did, or have to work/do things/stash milk for future doing of things. All hail the breast pump, bane of my existence.

So there’s your boob, and here’s to breast ptosis everywhere, may we learn to celebrate it as the triumph of life it should be. The Bit of a Boob print is up on the website as always, and also on the wall in the Roseleaf until the end of March, where it looks really quite cool even if I do say so myself.

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By body bags, I of course mean all those bags that hold your various insides in place in your body. Although the bags generally have other functions, too. Your body is very practical. And by gut aprons I mean your greater omentum.

Your greater omentum is the bigger of your body’s two peritoneal folds. (Your peritoneal folds (peritoneum) is the membrane that surrounds your abdominal cavity. At its essence: the bag that holds your guts in place.) This big fold is double layered: it attaches to the bottom of your stomach, and flops down over your intestines (like a big apron) before doubling up under itself to attach the other end to your transverse mesocolon (which is the mesentery that holds in the “straight” bit of your large intestine. What’s mesentery? It’s the bits of your gut bag that hold your intestines in place, as well as holding all the fat, blood vessels and nerves that like to be in amongst your intestines. Is that enough to take in yet?).

So what’s the function of this big internal apron? It holds a lot of fat. The amount is very variable depending on the human, but its main function is to provide protection for and from the other organs. Because the greater omentum is a fairly free-hanging, double layered flap, it makes it very mobile. It can move around within the abdomen, it stops various bits in the front sticking to the bits in the back (did you ever think about how you don’t want your organs to stick together? No, me neither. That’s one of the main things all the bags do though.) The greater omentum can stick itself to organs that might get inflamed (and therefore bigger, like the appendix) and give protection from that organ sticking to other bits of your insides. You might say it polices your abdomen. And in fact, apparently it is referred to as the policeman of the abdomen. Nee naw.

Now, there’s just a few days until the Guts Print, alongside all my others, will be adorning the walls of the Roseleaf pub in Leith. So make sure you pop in for chips and pints if you’re in Leith, or you can see all the prints on my website too.

*Read: Cold.

**Read: Yes, I am furious.

***Of course I believe in fate, I’m also a fucking artist. And a romantic. Deep down.

Your heart sits its little heart bum on your diaphragm, pretty near the vertical middle of your body. It’s not quite central because about two thirds of your heart’s mass lie to the left of your midline (imagine you’re James Bond, and you’re about to get cut perfectly in half by an industrial laser - ignore the fact that you’re expected to die, you’re James Bond, you’ll get out of it. That line the laser is thinking of drawing - that’s your midline). I personally think your heart looks like a pear (not conference, more like a comice) and the pear stem would be pointing towards your left elbow, with a good chunk of it sitting to the left of that midline.

Your diaphragm, the bit that the heart sits on, is a big, slightly curved sheet of muscle that helps squeeze air out of your lungs. Your heart is properly tucked in between your lungs like it’s lying in the snuggliest bed that also happens to breathe. Your heart is important, so it’s pretty nestled in there - hidden behind your sternum (which is a seriously chunky plate of bone. I haven’t tried, personally, but I reckon pushing a wooden stake through there would be… difficult. If vampires exist, I think you’d need a much longer stick and you’d have to go in from the side. Just sayin’, everyone who isn’t super-strength Buffy) and your ribcage. And cuddled into that lung-bed (there’s even a notch in the left one to accommodate the extra third of pear), in its own little sleeping bag.

If you’ve been reading my ramblings for any length of time you might remember my obsession with the fact that almost everything (and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration) within your body either is or has its own bag. The heart’s bag is called the pericardium - a membrane that surrounds and protects the organ, keeping it in place all the while allowing it to beat smoothly and easily. The heart bag actually comes in two parts - one outer part that’s not stretchy, keeps the heart anchored in your chest and prevents your heart from overstretching, and an inner part that has two layers that act as a sort of lube to make sure your heart can beat as furiously as it likes without friction.

So there you have it, that’s where your heart is. I feel so strongly that you know where your own heart is that I made this image into a print, although it has the added bonus of alluding to the idea that your home is where your heart is if you put it on the wall in your home… See what I did there?

It will also be part of a wee collection of prints soon to be hanging in the Roseleaf in Leith, in case you want to have a delightful pint or a cocktail in a teacup and enjoy some of my illustrations.