From sketches to a draft

Here's where I am on the illustration for the Functional Glycomics Gateway highlight (see last post). It's not due until the 5th so I think I'll chew on it over the weekend.

This is roughly the size at which it'll appear in the piece.  The hardest part was spending days doing the hand and eye-breaking work of perfecting the shading of the galectin-1 protein structures. All that time I spent learning how to draw shaded spheres has really paid off and I'm quite pleased with the outcome.

(Yes, you guessed it, I rendered Galectin-1 using VMD molecular visualization software*. There's your pitiful April fool's day prank.)

*Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., "VMD - Visual Molecular Dynamics" J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.