scicomm

In my Canva infographics era

/ Scicomm /

I work as a science communicator at a planetarium. Part of my job is making social media posts explaining the latest space and/or science news.

I’ve mentioned before that I want to get more into information graphics, and I would love to be able to create cool things like science comics and hand-drawn infographics more often, but realistically that’s not always possible. But I figured that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing…maybe I can’t make a comic, but I don’t have to settle for a regular text post either. So I’ve been trying some kind of middle ground…now when I have to make one of these posts, I try to ask myself—is there a more visual way to show this? and can I make it in Canva at my work computer?

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Illustrating a short story for Asteroid Day

/ Art & Comics, Scicomm / , ,


June 30th is Asteroid Day! ☄️

The Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS) just published the second edition of their book of short stories for Asteroid Day, where they publish the winners of their yearly writing contest, and pair them with “astro-illustrators”, people with an Astronomy background who also make art…I’m surprisingly not alone in that category!

The first edition of the book came out in 2021 and I couldn’t participate because I was too busy working on The Do-Over, so I’m glad I got the chance to join in for the second edition! I haven’t done illustration work in aaaaaages, so I really struggled with this in the beginning, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.

You can download a digital edition of the book (in Spanish) for free over here!

Infographics for a total lunar eclipse

/ Art & Comics, Scicomm /

Got the chance to make some infographics for Planetario USACH again, this time to explain the total lunar eclipse that happened earlier today. I’m particularly proud of the third image—saying “friday at 3AM” got a lot of people confused (“is it Thursday night or Friday night???”), so in a last-minute flash of inspiration I decided to add a timeline to make it reeeeeally hard to get it wrong. It’s very simple, but I think it gets the point across!


Did I watch the eclipse? I tried, but I stayed up until 2AM and then I was so exhausted that I gave up and fell asleep. Oh well…

What Happened to Pluto?

/ Art & Comics, Scicomm /

Did you know it’s been 18 years since Pluto stopped being a planet?

This is a little comic I made for Planetario USACH* explaining why Pluto is no longer a planet—going from the definition of planet, to the history of new planets being discovered, and finally the IAU’s 2006 definition of planet and the creation of “dwarf planets” as a separate category.

(*this is why the comic is in Spanish…I still wanted to document this here, though!)

I’ve been thinking a lot about science and comics lately…for a long time I’ve been doing both things separately, keeping my distance between my two jobs, but I want to move more into the intersection of both things. It feels more like playing to my strengths, right? Anyway, I had a great time working on this and I’m looking forward to making more science comics in the future! ✨