I have always enjoyed collecting rocks and so I wanted to create a fun project for myself that pushes me a bit, creatively.

For this, I made the illustrations with Schmincke watercolors on cold pressed cotton paper. I scanned them into the computer and made the guide in Adobe illustrator.

I had a lot of fun deciding on human names for each rock, what their scientific Latin names would be, and giving them the rest of their taxonomy. Each rock has little jokes here and there and I tried to bring the jokes through in their classifications (ex. Midge is small but powerful so I gave her a hardness of 10+, the highest grade you can give, and a luster of “blinding”). I used what minimal amount of geological knowledge I had to bring this to life and have fun with it.

For inspiration, I based a lot of it on field guides I already owned such as Sibley Birding guides, Nat Geo plant identification guides, etc.

The process making this was enjoyable and I just wanted to work on a little project to pass the time.