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.