Shadows in the rain

Even Cerne Abbas in Dorset, UK was gate crashed by the torrential rain over Christmas, so this week’s drawings are inspired by items of furniture in the hired cottage. The complicated column of a brass table lamp was a definite shape builder test piece. When I got to the base, the drawing of the first rhombus reminded me that I am a cell biologist not an artist. Even if I could work out how to create an Ai perspective grid it wouldn’t have helped me work out the correct angle to recreate what the eyes see on a flat art board. So I drew three guide lines; left, right and front and blundered hopefully on. It’s not quite right somehow.

I was then inspired by the back of a chair in the bedroom which produced wonderful shadows on the wall even when it was raining outside! I created the shadow by copying the chair back then subjecting it to a -5^o shear, 45% reduced opacity and a Gaussian blur.

Colourful Pies

Last week I needed a pie-chart for a drawing of the hair cycle. Pie-charts couldn’t be easier in Ai and once you have worked out that you need the white ‘direct selection’ tool rather than the black ‘selection’ tool to select individual slices, colouring them and creating patterns is straight forward too. The slices then behave like shapes. So here is a pie summarising my work this year which probably isn’t entirely accurate but it is pretty.

I found the leaves and stripes in the swatch library menu bottom left of the swatch panel. I have tried to find a way to make the stripes a different colour but haven’t been able to work it out yet. However, the spade, graduation cap and quill were easy; I dragged my drawings into the swatch panel to create new patterns. These patterns are transparent so I copied the pie segment and pasted in place first so that I could have a coloured background. The rainbow effect is created using the gradient tool and the holiday picture is created by copying the pie segment and placing it on top of a holiday snap and then creating a clipping mask.

Jenner's House

I saw an advert in the paper yesterday that cut out words from a rectangle and I just had to check I could do it too in Adobe Illustrator. It wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. Effect-Path-outline stroke allows blending of text colours but it is still text and not an object. Eventually, after realising this I found the correct way to do it: Type-create outlines. Then I was able to subtract the text from the box.

I have used a photograph I took on a fascinating visit to Edward Jenner’s house earlier this year. This small building, in his garden, is where he vaccinated the poor against small pox.

Bee-Card

I’m trying to create a Christmas e-card for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and all my carefully drawn bee delicacies need to be shrunk so small I'm losing all the detail I have poured into them. It is hard not to waste time doing too much detail in a drawing and to think about the bigger picture. So here they are (not so small) in a bouquet for bees.

Doing the bee-card I realise I have flowering currant, plum, clover and lavender in my garden but need to plant some thistles and foxglove.

More Sweat than a Squiggle

Last week’s Adobe Illustrator drawing was a replacement for the slide I use to describe the role of skin in thermoregulation. I needed a diagram showing a hair shaft for insulation, a nerve ending for detection of thermal changes, blood vessels that dilate to release heat and a sweat gland for heat loss via evaporation of sweat.

I thought drawing a sweat gland would be easy; draw a fat squiggly line and then make it into a solid object with a line around it (object-path-outline stroke). But, as you can see on the left, this didn’t work quite how I had intended since it outlines the outer boundary of the squiggle rather than the squiggle itself. So I had to cut my next squiggle up then outline the pieces and layer them so that the ends weren’t visible. Sorted.

Autumnal Clipping

I thought Effect>pathfinder>intersect would do the same job as a clipping mask for this but it didn't seem to work. I always struggle to remember how to do a clipping mask because it relies on getting the path and picture in the right order. But it is kind of fun.