It's a long story about a short deadline...

Sunday: Draft #1

Monday: Draft #2

Tuesday: Draft #3

Wednesday: Draft #4

Done!

Friday nights just aren't what they used to be.

After a long week of drawing, teaching, and parenting, there's nothing I like better to do than find an old twistie-tie in the junk drawer, mold it into a right-handed helix, and sketch it from seven different angles. Oh, and then write a sarcastic blog post about it. These are going to be templates for a new project I just started that will have DNA in the illustration. It's a tight deadline, so it was fortuitous that the husband had plans for a much deserved night out with the guys tonight. Ooohh... maybe next I'll fashion a transcription factor out of some dryer lint. Or, maybe it's time I start planning a night out myself.

Four stages of tumor progression, updated again

Here's the latest on the project I posted about on May 15th and April 24th. There's been a bit of a change in course since the clients decided that instead of their original idea of having the illustration stretch across a fold-out page, they want four separate images. What's nice is that it makes the problem of scale much simpler. Each image has its own frame of reference. What is not nice is that in stage 2 (upper right) the image looks not so much like uncontrolled cell growth as it does like a small turtle has gotten loose in this scene of normal, healthy cells. But that can (and will) be fixed. I only had a few days to turn around these new sketches, so the wily turtle made it through this round, but his days are numbered. He will slowly inch his way out of the picture as I find a better way to represent a ball of tumor cells. 

Cover art issue out

On Aprill 11 I posted a sketch for this project, and here it is all done. It's on the inside cover of this week's Angewandte Chemie, which you can see here.

I'm back to teaching this week after taking the spring semester off. Nothing like an entire semester of g-chem in 6 weeks to yank me back into reality. This is the same course I taught last fall during the last three or so months of my pregnancy. So I am pretty sure the baby is ready to dominate the AP exam.

Well, Hello there you old dusty Wacom

About 3 years ago I bought a Wacom pen tablet, which is basically like the device you use to electronically give your signature when you use your credit card at the grocery store, but for drawing. I played around with it a bit and then secretly, subconsciously, and guiltily, realized that I didn't like it very much and went back to my old fashioned pencils and sketchbook. I dug it out again last week because I knew how much faster I could make several different variations on a sketch if I used it. So I dusted it off and set it up to work in Photoshop. Unlike in Illustrator (or at least as far as I can tell so far), Photoshop lets me use it like the old school pens that change line width based on how hard you press down on the paper. This revelation alone secured the pen tablet's position on my desk for the foreseeable future. And indeed, I was able to bang out three designs based on the scribbles above.

But the best part is that it took me far less time to realize that I didn't like any of these designs, and within a day of sending them to the client, I came up with the new idea shown below (in the place where I'm convinced 99% of ideas are born, the shower). I shouldn't be doing this but here is a tip to any prospective clients who may be reading this. When I send you initial drafts, if you have the time to spare, wait a few days before responding. Rather than coming to the obvious conclusion that you are extraordinarily busy, which you undoubtedly are, I will assume that you are trying to come up with a gentle way to tell me that you don't like any of the drafts, causing me to redouble my efforts to come up with something better in the meantime. Thanks to the Wacom, those initial ideas that must be waded through to get to the better ones won't cost very much.

This project is a design for an academic lab's home page, and highlights their work on the role of ubiquitination in regulating proteolysis and autophagy of intracellular proteins.

Attack of the smog-eating bacteria

Here's an update to "Traffic Jam" from May 1st. It will be submitted as possible cover art, so the blank space at the top is where the title would go. I like this idea better (and more importantly so does the client), but there's something still bothering me about it. I think it has something to do with the photo I took but I'm not sure so I open it up periodically and look at it with fresh eyes.  Maybe it's that I don't want the trees to be green. Hey, it never occurred to me before that I could bring a yearned-for autumn to San Diego with Photoshop. Surprising considering the hordes of pretty people here who have that healthy, just-airbrushed appearance to them.

Four stages of tumor progression, updated

I posted an initial sketch for this illustration here on April 24th. One way I've been trying to continue to improve my work is to make more thumbnail sketches. It's a good way to find the best composition. But this time I may have overdone it. I just counted, and I apparently made no fewer than 24 sketches for this project. Obsess much? This is the first digital version, still in greyscale because I will have some direction in terms of the color palette.

This is not a mommy blog

But I finally decided what to do with a blank wall in the baby's room (only five months after he was born, but whatever) so I thought I'd share. I just wanted some colorful, high-contrast images on the wall, but I didn't like any of the commercially available wall decals that I could find. Turns out babies love to look at faces too, so I whipped these up in Adobe Illustrator and now he can look at his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever he wants. After printing these out I changed my mind about the order of placement, so some of the color choices are nagging at me now, but not nearly as much as the blank wall did.

Traffic jam

This image is not final, it's really just an idea. Acetogenic bacteria can live on carbon dioxide, but in order to do so, a key reaction must take place. It seems simple - a methyl group is transferred from folate to vitamin B12 (the molecule shown here). But a number of proteins must organize themselves and undergo what the authors of this work call "molecular gymnastics". They used X-ray crystallography to obtain a complete picture of this process, and remarkably show that the requisite conformational changes even occur in the protein crystals. To get the photo for this piece, I went to the pedestrian overpass at 5:00pm last Friday expecting the freeway to look like a parking lot. I found myself ambivalent about what I saw. The photo is not as striking, but I suppose I should be happy for the earth?

Four stages of tumor progression

This is a rough sketch of an illustration I'm doing for a brochure for a non-profit research institute. I skipped a week of posting because we were on vacation. It was our first trip with the baby, and I daresay we all three scarcely emerged unscathed. I meant to post this sketch, which I finished the day before we left, while we were on the road, but if you've ever traveled with an infant, you will not be surprised that it didn't happen. That said, I was able to get a little bit of work done. After the baby went to bed, I worked on another sketch while standing at the sink of the hotel bathroom where the light wouldn't wake him up, then took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to my client in Germany. I guess the flip side of being able to do this job from anywhere is that I am never really on vacation.

How It's Made - derivatized carbohydrates

I've been wanting to do a drawing like this for a long time, and finally a project came along that was perfect for it. It's for cover art, so I can use quite a bit of artistic license, and the article it highlights is about metabolic engineering, or hijacking a biosynthetic assembly line to put a modified sugar on the cell surface. I left off some details on the rough sketch here since it's not published yet, but I'll post the final image when it is. The plan is for this drawing to be done in white and overlaid on top of a sweet image of a glowing zebrafish head from the paper.  As a side note, I watched some clips of "How It's Made" for a bit of inspiration. We love that show around here.

Running Interference

This animation goes along with a video of a postdoc describing her research in RNA interference. She starts by explaining that a short stretch of double-stranded RNA is complementary to a stretch of DNA in the genome. When the interfering RNA enters the cell, it binds to and is separated into single strands by a multi-protein complex called RISC. RISC tosses one strand out and then uses the remaining one to guide it to mRNA that bears complementarity to the short interfering RNA strand. Once that mRNA is found, a protease within the complex destroys it so that it can no longer be translated into protein. The hope is that this could be used to combat diseases that are manifested by overexpression of certain proteins.

Please take a moment for reflection...

First project on my new computer! As you can see, the reflection of this molecule is not exactly true. I am wondering how recognizable this image is, so if you would be so kind as to help me out, please leave a comment here or send me a message through the contact page to tell me what you think the molecule in the reflection is made of. Thanks!

Update on Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 11:12PM by Mary

With some help from a facebook poll, I found that most people recognized it as what it is - corkscrew pasta, aka tricolor rotini. The molecule itself is folic acid, which is found in pasta and bread, among other foods. One person guessed Twizzlers. Another thought it was DNA, which makes sense considering that the rotinis are right-handed helices. Perhaps these rotini will be of use for a future project.

A Matrix-inspired cover design

Last week my computer completely died and although I had backed up recently, I lost two days worth of work on projects that are both due tomorrow (above is one of four designs being submitted as possible cover art for one of the two projects). Also last week, the baby forgot how to take naps. As Steve McCroskey in Airplane! says, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. Thankfully I married some sort of wizard, because I met both deadlines, keeping a perfect record intact, the naps are back, and now I am going to sleep too.

Bringing grunge back

This started as a really simple mock-up design for a cover art project, and turned into a lesson in giving images that weathered, vintage look. When I decided to grunge it up, I turned off the meter so that my client wouldn't have to pay for the lesson, and searched for different techniques for doing this. What I ended up doing involved downloading some free splatter brushes for photoshop, adding noise and some eraser strokes, and incorporating a photo of our bathroom tile that I snapped with my phone. 

I Second That Stop Motion

This is a story about how urea-based compounds can sense ketones such as acetone and cyclohexanone, which are used in the purification of certain explosives and whose high vapor pressure make them useful for detection. Over the past few days I made this stop motion animation to play as the narrator (aka the graduate student working on this research) describes how ketones interact with urea. She explains that the lone pairs of electrons on the ketone's carbonyl oxygen "grab" urea's hydrogens. My collaborators suggested the arms literally reaching out and grabbing the H's, which then set the tone for the rest of the animation. The ensuing hydrogen bond between oxygen and hydrogen leaves the N-H bond to exist in a "lone pair-like" state. As my former Chem 151 students hopefully remember, a lone pair is believed to take up more space than a bond, therefore creating more repulsion of the neighboring bonds. The bond angles adjust to accommodate this change, and voila. This subtle change in structure is amplified through the connected polymer in such a way that both the fluorescence and refractive index properties of the compound are changed, and these changes can be measured. I never considered lone pairs to be such bullies but I guess they are kind of lone rebels. I'll bet Mala Radhakrishnan could write a poem about this...

No thanks, I couldn't eat another electron

This is a very simplified animation to show how molecular oxygen acts as the final electron acceptor after the food we eat is metabolized and turned into energy. I know what you're thinking, and yes, electrons are South Beach Diet-approved.

Work-in-progress

These days I've been working on this cover art piece highlighting a review article on photolyzable caging molecules. The one shown above binds to (cages) zinc until it's hit with light at a particular wavelength, which leads to bond cleavage. With the molecule split in two, it no longer binds zinc. This is a neat trick for releasing zinc at a specific time and place as controlled by the researcher, and may be a particularly useful tool in neurobiology due to the role of zinc in the central nervous system. The products of photolysis are shown as having been taken out of commission, lying helplessly on the floor.

Earlier today, I was responding to an e-mail from a graduate student I've been corresponding with who is interested in possibly pursuing a career in science illustration. She showed me a piece she had done as cover art and asked for feedback. I told her that when doing cover art, I start by looking at several covers from recent issues of the journal it's going to in order to get a sense of the style. More often than not, the editors seem to be looking for the most eye-catching graphic, not an image that seeks to tell a story or show details of the research it is highlighting. I admitted that it is a challenge for me to remember this, and had to laugh at myself when I finished the e-mail and then opened up the image above to work on.  I guess it's easier to give advice than take it, even when it's my own.

Stymied by X-rays

Here is an animation I made last week for the MIT/HHMI video series for undergraduates. In this video, a professor describes her work in X-ray crystallography, and in doing so explains the principles of light wave diffraction. That is where I come in. I make these animations in Flash, but create many of the images in Illustrator. Here I'm apparently approaching the limits of this strategy. These waves of X-rays brought in from Illustrator don't obey the timeline, but rather appear only when they are good and ready. Luckily the person who assembles this into the video can control the timing, but that's not an ideal solution. I'm still deciding what is the best way around this without compromising the quality of the images, probably by rasterizing or flattening the transparency, but in the background I am hearing the call of 3D animation software growing louder and louder.

When snapshots don't tell the full story

Here are a couple of images I made for a client to submit as cover art for his article, which just came out, so I can show these now. The idea is that a certain ligand undergoes a conformational change in the binding pocket of a protein, but this change happens too rapidly to see it by X-ray crystallography. Instead, they used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to capture this interesting behavior. In X-ray structures, the ligand always appears to be in the same conformation. The time scale of NMR enabled the authors to observe two different binding modes of the ligand, and show that the switching between these two binding modes happens in the binding site. Pretty cool stuff.