Scientific Illustration
Click Consonant Articulation Figure
A three-part figure showing how a click consonant is produced, created for a phonetics research article.
Visiting Assistant Professor Jeremy Coburn with Hadza tribe in Tanzania, Summer 2026.
The task
A faculty member at the University of Rochester who researches and teaches phonetics and phonology asked me to create a figure for an article he's submitting to journals for publication. The figure needed to show how a click consonant is articulated: where the tongue makes contact, how it moves, and what happens at the release.
The problem and my solution
A click happens in a fraction of a second, but it's a sequence: the tongue seals the mouth in two places, the body of the tongue pulls down and back, and the tip releases so air rushes in. A figure has to slow that down enough for a reader to follow, and it has to stay accurate enough to hold up in a research article. Rather than fit all three phases into one illustration, I drew them separately. Each panel shows one moment with one or two labels, so the reader can compare the panels side by side and see exactly what changed. The outline of the head stays identical across all three, which means the only thing that moves is the thing the figure is about. Most diagrams of this kind are black and white, and the tongue, the palate, and the open space of the mouth all end up as outlines of the same weight. I used color to create depth, so it's easy to tell what's the tongue, what's the palate, and what's the space between them. That keeps the figure readable at a glance, including for someone seeing this kind of diagram for the first time.
