How to build a human

It’s been a while since I made a science infographic! But hopefully this month’s post is full of enough biology to make up for the wait. I’ve actually wanted to do an embryogenesis GIF for months, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work. Then I stumbled across this awesome GIF on Reddit and got the idea to use a spiraling animation style. (Incidentally, if anyone knows who made that GIF I’d love to know).

I’m actually really happy with how this turned out. I made this using 44 animations that are 9 frames each. That’s 396 sketches total - probably the most complicated GIF I’ve made so far. I am a little sad that I wasn’t able to show size properly though. For example. the 24 week fetus is about 40 times heavier than a 12 week fetus (but you can’t tell that from this drawing). This is my last post for 2014, so happy holidays everyone! Thank you so much for reading Tabletop Whale and supporting my art.

• Sources

• Gilbert, Scott. Developmental Biology, 9th Edition. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., 2010.