Meet your makers: Tucson artist blends love of art and biology

Since she was a kid, Nathalie Aall has been interested in art and wildlife.

When it came time to think about college, she was faced with choosing between the two.

Thinking she could only choose one, she ultimately went with biology and received her master’s degree in biological sciences in 2011. But since then, Aall has found away to combine her love of biology with her love of art.

Aall is a scientific illustrator and wildlife biologist. A scientific illustration is a way of documenting and visually representing biological concepts. For Aall, that means animals and how they relate to their ecosystems.

“It’s a very technical form of art, so there’s a lot of precision and accuracy that’s necessary for it,” Aall says.

For example, some illustrations of coyotes might depict them sitting down while howling. In reality, coyotes usually stand when they howl, Aall says, so a scientific illustration would portray them standing up.

“It’s about conveying the beauty of nature, but it’s also the educational part,” she says.

Aall is mostly self-taught when it comes to art, though she also studied natural scientific illustration at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Her main medium is watercolor with a bit of graphite, but she’ll do some digital editing if need be and says she’s constantly trying new mediums. Aall also sells her artwork — digital prints, pet accessories and stickers — on Etsy.

“(An interest in art) has always been with me,” Aall says. “I guess for the very beginnings of it, I could ‘blame’ it on my mom. She definitely influenced the artistic side of me. She’s always been an artistic person — very abstract though, so very different from mine.”

Meanwhile, Aall’s dad is a mechanical engineer, which is where she might’ve developed her more technical approach to art.

Aall, who grew up in Germany and moved to the United States when she was 10, moved to Tucson in 2016 after finishing her studies in Seattle. She made the move to the Old Pueblo because she thought her next step should be illustrating wildlife in the Sonoran Desert.

“It’s an ode to my new home,” she says.

Aall works with The Biodiversity Group in Tucson and her goal is to eventually create field guides.