Natural history illustration has a long tradition. Maria Sibylla Merian was documenting insects in meticulous detail in the seventeenth century. Ernst Haeckel's radiolarian drawings in the nineteenth century were simultaneously science and art. The great Victorian entomologists produced plates of such precision that they are still used as reference material today.
What made these images work was the same thing that makes good scientific illustration work now: the discipline of looking very carefully at the specific object in front of you, and recording what is actually there rather than what you expect to see.
The Axisophy Bugs collection is built in this tradition. Each print is a scientific illustration adapted from the book Bugs by Simon Tyler, published by Pavilion Books in association with Buglife - refined for wall scale, with linework, composition and colour palettes designed for generous print sizes. Here are some of the strongest natural history prints in the range.
