The truth about my inspiration
Like the post on July 2nd, this figure is for a systems biology textbook that a client is writing and I am glad to be involved in. For this one, he sketched out roughly what he wanted to go into it and I turned it into this. At this point we'll probably make some decisions about the style of the illustrations that will go into the book, since we'll want to keep them consistent. For instance, I've been using my two-toned shaded but sort of 2D representations of proteins. I have a few different ways of representing proteins, but when I can't use real X-ray crystal structures, this is probably my favorite. I'd like to say that my style was influenced by Picasso or Cassandre. The truth is, it is inspired by watching the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force on TV (particularly the character Meatwad). I was looking to strike the balance between simplicity and aesthetics, and this is what happened. We'll see if it sticks.