Coloring Book Celebrates Mathematical Beauty of Nature with Hand-Drawn Golden Ratio Illustrations

April 1, 2016

Chambered nautilus shell
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Rafael Araujo’s hand-drawn Golden Ratio illustrations are a beautiful fusion of art with science. For the past 40 years, the Venezuelan architect and illustrator has been perfecting his amazing drawings that are all connected by this common theme. Armed with nothing but a pencil, compass, ruler, and protractor he creates drawings that depict the mathematical brilliance of the natural world, and has recently begun to compile renditions of his best work into an adult coloring book that seeks to reconnect humans with nature.

Araujo’s illustrations revolve around intelligent patterns of growth that are ruled by the Golden Ratio. This special number, commonly annotated with the Greek letter Phi (?), is equal to 1.618 and can be seen in all sorts of natural spirals, sequences, and proportions. “Phyllotaxis” is the name given for the tendency of organic things to grow in spiral patterns and this number pattern reoccurs so often in nature that some researchers have deemed it a universal law for the perfection of structures, forms, and proportions. From sea shells, leaves, crystals, and even butterfly wings, Phi can be traced throughout our environment, time and time again.

Applying the Golden Ratio to his drawings and leaving the construction lines in the final images allows Araujo to create designs that clearly gravitate around this mathematical framework. Each composition is painstakingly detailed: it can take up to 100 hours for the artist to complete a single one. With a successful funding campaign under way, Araujo’s coloring book that celebrates this sacred geometric pattern will hopefully be available to a global audience sometime soon. In the meantime, the campaign is still accepting funding on Kickstarter with plenty of perks available to backers.

UPDATE: The coloring book is now available to purchase on Amazon.