Lines & Matter
A closer look at Lines & Matter
A closer look at the living world.
Lines & Matter creates illustrated books, printable learning materials, and free nature guides that help people explore the lives around them. We bring art and science together to make learning something you can read, color, question, and return to.
The guides are free to explore. Our printable products offer another way to spend time with the subjects—and help support the work behind the site.
Hi, I’m Will.
I’m a biologist, and most of my work has come down to looking closely at living things. I’ve caught and tagged lizards in the Bahamas, studied African savanna trees and grasses in the lab, and developed sensors that were deployed in Kruger National Park in South Africa. I’ve also studied photosynthesis in algae and plants, and I’ve worked as a research and development engineer for biotech and agtech startups. Now I’m finishing a PhD in plant mechanobiology: how plants sense and respond to the physical forces around them.
The longer I look at a living thing, the more there is to see: the pattern on a lizard’s scales, the way a grass stem bends without breaking, how a leaf turns light into food. Every close look leaves me with another question, and that is still my favorite part.
Lines & Matter grew out of that. Coloring an animal slows you down enough to notice the shape of a fin or where one color gives way to the next. The free field guides are there for the questions that follow: what it is, where it lives, how it behaves, and where the facts come from. I hope they help you look a little closer, wherever you are.
How the collection takes shape
The illustrations are made with AI assistance and selected and curated for Lines & Matter. They are creative interpretations. Species accounts draw on linked natural-history references; reference photographs have their own credits and reuse information.
A beautiful illustration and a reliable species account serve different purposes. These pages are for learning and creative enjoyment, not for identifying an animal to handle or a mushroom to eat.
For the world that inspires us
We’re committed to donating 10% of Lines & Matter’s annual profits to wildlife conservation. For this commitment, profit means revenue remaining after business expenses, calculated before the conservation donation.
Each year, we’ll publish an update here showing how much we donated and which organizations we supported. This is our contribution from business profits, not a separate donation added at checkout. We’ll distinguish donations already made from future commitments.
Help it grow
Found a fact that needs another look? Have a species you would love to see? I welcome thoughtful corrections, questions, and requests. A useful source is always appreciated.
If the free field guides have been useful to you, you can also chip in. Every contribution helps add new species and keeps the guides free to explore.
Contributions go to Lines & Matter, a small business, not a charity, so they aren’t tax-deductible.