Retro-Futurist Scientific Illustration by Leonel Palacios.
Live site: hivehue.art
HiveHue is a portfolio of scientific illustrations where the geometry, the trajectories, and the physics are actually correct. Each piece is drawn from real physics and primary sources — orbital mechanics, relativity, plasma physics, and spaceflight — in the visual language of 1930s–60s science posters: Bauhaus structure, WPA boldness, and Space-Race optimism, with a deliberate 3–5 colour palette and bold typography.
The illustrations are made by someone who has worked on the subjects they depict — a background spanning industrial design, engineering physics, a PhD in aerospace engineering, and a decade in spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control. The result is figures that are both editorially striking and technically right, intended for editors, researchers, and grant reviewers.
A few examples from the gallery:
- Tokamak — fusion drawn as a system of symbols, encoding the etymology of deuterium and tritium in the strand counts.
- The Three-Body Problem — trajectories numerically integrated in Python, showing what deterministic chaos actually looks like.
- Starshade — a NASA external occulter, with petal geometry derived from apodization theory.
- Penrose Diagram — the maximally extended Schwarzschild solution, light rays at exactly 45°.
- Hohmann Transfer — Walter Hohmann's 1925 propellant-minimizing two-burn transfer.
This is a static site — plain HTML and CSS, no build step.
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
index.html |
Main portfolio page: gallery, about/method, experiments, contact. |
perspective.html |
Perspective Lab — an interactive study in depth, an experiment exploring how an image works rather than what it depicts. |
images/ |
Illustration files and Open Graph thumbnails. |
CNAME |
Custom domain (hivehue.art) for GitHub Pages. |
The gallery content lives in the WORKS array near the bottom of
index.html — each entry has an image path, title, kicker, description, and
metadata, and drives both the grid and the lightbox.
No dependencies or build step. Open index.html directly, or serve the folder:
python3 -m http.server 8000
# then visit http://localhost:8000Hosted on GitHub Pages with the custom domain in CNAME. Pushes to the default
branch publish automatically. The site uses GoatCounter for anonymous,
cookie-free visitor statistics.
© 2026 Leonel Palacios — HiveHue. All rights reserved.