Illustrations for White Light

Illustrations created for Jack Lohmann's book, White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus - in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World (Pantheon).

All images (except Chapter 10) are carved and printed linocuts with hand-painted corrections or digital edits in Photoshop. I noted in the captions which images included more significant components of digital drawing, Photoshop edits, or hand painting.

Photos of UK edition of book from Amazon, found here.

Prologue. A whale fall in motion.

Carved and printed by hand, with details such as the whale skeleton tail, shark fins, and octopus and crab fine lines were corrected in Photoshop.

Chapter 1. At the Bawdsey Cliff in England, you can see the divide between geological layers, the Red Crag and the London Clay. It was here that, upon finding phosphate rock, England jumpstarted the industrial use of phosphate in agriculture.

Carved and printed by hand, with touch ups in Photoshop.

Chapter 2. Phosphorus supports the growth of life; as it erodes from mountains downstream rivers, the phosphate "reenters" circulation (after being "trapped" in geology, or rocks) and contributes to increased density of plant life and other biological activity.

Carved and printed by hand, with some hand-painted touch ups before scanning.

Chapter 3. An English countryside village. As sewage systems were introduced, phosphorus in sewage that was previously recycled into agricultural practices was increasingly washed out to the ocean, exiting the cycle of use by humans and animals for the foreseeable future.

Carved and printed by hand, with touch ups to the bridge fine lines in Photoshop.

Chapter 4. Phosphate mining in Florida and other hotspots degrades the environment; when land is filled in again to be used, it lacks the depth and vitality that can support robust plant life.

Carved and printed by hand, with edits to refine the soil details in Photoshop.

Chapter 5. Mining and processing phosphate leaves behind toxic chemicals that contribute to higher rates of cancer in humans and animals in the vicinity.

This image is a combination of linocut, paint pen, and digital drawing. Individual components were carved and printed by hand - the horse, cow, human, and two pig skeletons - which I then combined digitally into this layout. In Photoshop, I made significant edits to the human skeleton (with the help of my friend Zach!) and arranged the dots throughout.

Chapter 6. Phosphogypsum stacks are immense structures built to store toxic wastewater leftover from processing phosphate fertilizer. They involve digging beneath layers of Earth's surface through to aquifers, but below the water table, represented by the diagonally-striped line.

This image is a combination of linocut and digital drawing. I carved and printed components of each layer, then used Photoshop to combine and repeat pattern elements, refine the layer of the Avon Park formation, and create consistent fine lines throughout. The font was made using my handwriting digitally.

Chapter 7. The swamps of Florida, rich with life in their rivers.

This image was primarily carved and handprinted in linocut with some touch ups and corrections to the tree roots in Photoshop.

Chapter 8. The environment of Nauru, a small Pacific Island nation, has been severely damaged by phosphate mining. This image depicts the Nauruan story of Eigigu, who climbed a tree into the sky and married Maramen, the moon.

Carved and printed in linocut, with corrections to the tree leaves made in Photoshop, combining a few versions of this print into one.

Chapter 9. Healthy soil contains a vibrant and complex ecosystem of microbes, invisible to the naked eye but crucial to grow and sustain robust and healthy animals and plants.

Carved and printed linocut, with edits in Photoshop to create consistency in the dots throughout and make touch ups.