cmog:
Interested in seeing the design drawings for these invertebrates?
The Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka archive in the Rakow Research Library includes over 900 original art drawings of plants and invertebrate animals made as studies for the glass models.
Check out the digital archive >
We share all sorts of amazing things that aren’t what they seem at the Geyser of Awesome. Here’s another one, and it’s a doozy:
You may think you’re looking at photos of beautiful undersea invertebrates, but these delicate beauties are actually models made of clear, coloured, and painted glass. Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father and son team of master glassmakers (previously featured here), painstakingly created these extraordinary glass models of invertebrate animals (jellyfish, snails, sea anemones, corals, hidroids, starfish, sea-cucumbers, squid, seaslugs and bivalves) from the mid 1800s until the 1930s.
Photographer Guido Mocafico visited the natural history museums which still house collections of the Blaschka’s work, including Harvard University Herbaria, the Corning Museum of Glass/Cornell University, and the Natural History Museums in London and Ireland, in order to create a marvelous series of photographs celebrating these exquisite models. He set the pieces against dark backdrops and carefully lit them to emphasize their different colours and textures.
As you can see here, the results that Guido Mocafico achieved for his travel and effort are completely wonderful. Click here to view more.
[via Faith is Torment]
Wish these were my photos. Beautiful.
