I have a website now!

www.alexisdemetriades.com

Exploded Cell Phone

This is an exploded view of a cell phone that I completed for The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for an upcoming exhibit entitled "The Natural History of the Cell Phone". I had initially begun the project with digital renderings, but Dr. Bell at the museum requested that I switch to watercolor to emphasize the often-overlooked handmade nature of high-tech objects.

 It was an unusual experience to sit down with something as modern as a cell phone and to approach it as though it was some sort of zoological or botanical specimen- from dissection to traditional representation of its parts. As I have no background in modern technology whatsoever, I felt a little bit naive in my approach, possibly as some of the early European scientific illustrators might have felt when drawing African animals for the first time.

These are the first in a series of cell phone portraits for the same exhibit illustrating various members of the cell phone family.

Here is a link to The Smithsonian's blog page about the exhibit:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/03/coming-soon-a-natural-history-of-the-cell-phone/

Exploded Sago Palm (Meteroxylon sagu)

This piece is for The Smithsonian, illustrating the many useful parts of the Sago palm. It has been made into a poster for children in Papua New Guinea! 

Trophy Head- Watercolor

This was the last piece I did at The Smithsonian. It was collected during the 1929 sugarcane expedition to Papua New Guinea. It is human skin stretched over an armature of clay, and it was smoked and decorated with paint, shell, bone, and bound up the back with basket weaving. It was considered to represent ideal human form, or the form that humans secretly possess. I was excited to paint it, because I had ordered the 1929 National Geographic, which has a long article about this expedition, and there is an image of this exact head in it, so I really felt like I got to play a part in the history of this object.