Extrude and Bevel your Cello

Having explored 3D in adobe Illustrator recently with the 3D revolve effect, I was keen to try extrude and bevel. It was incredibly easy because the default settings of -18 X axis, -26 Y axis and 8 degrees z-axis rotation seemed to convert my cello drawing into a 3D instrument.
This drawing was inspired by the fact I wanted to go to a concert a friend of mine was playing in. To do this, my dog needed to go into the kennel for the first time. I was anxious and imagined all sorts of scenarios except the one that happened. She was ill in the night and made a horrible mess of my living room so we didn't even get as far as the kennel.
So this is my imagination running riot and my dog being remorseful she prevented me going and taking up cello lessons.

How to draw medicine pills in adobe illustrator

For a diagram I was asked to do recently, I needed a pile of pills and realised I didn't know how to draw in 3D. So I have just worked it out by trial and error. First mistake I made was to try the effect on a whole pill when in actual fact I needed half a pill. Then I realised I needed to 3D revolve around the right edge, not the left. Finally when I tried to rotate my pill I got something like a centrifuge rotor so I tried changing the Z-axis as well as the Y and finally had what I needed to create my drawing.

How Long it Takes to Write a Novel

Like many people all over the world I started writing my first novel during National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org) last November and ended up with 25,000 words and, most importantly, a beginning, middle and end. Now I am past the target 50,000 words I was supposed to have written in a month and expect to finish an average length novel (about 75K) before next November. I was surprised how little time it takes, considering the busy four months I’ve had starting this year. Realistically though, the answer to the question How long does it take to write a novel? is probably fifty years in my case. Certainly my story is derived from experiences I have had over the last thirty years.

Probably a more interesting question is Why does a story suddenly have to be written? I’m a cell biologist, not a novelist. I think the reason why most people get through life without writing a novel is because they never found an urgent need to. There has to be a driving force to make it happen.

As well as the words I have written so far, I now have a synopsis and a design for the front cover with the help of Adobe Illustrator. The novel is based largely on a remote Scottish Island, something I’ve struggled to draw convincingly so I used a puffin in the fore-ground instead which was much more fun.

Arvon Poetry Course

When I was a teenager, English homework was an agonising affair because I could never think what to write about. It seems hard to believe that the same person has just returned from an Arvon poetry course at The Hurst where a morning session involved writing seven poems in three hours! There’s no doubt that Peter and Ann Sansom, our tutors, are magic but at the same time there must be some benefit from age and experience. I didn’t quite manage seven every morning but I did write poems about many things from

1. what happened at the weekend to memories of childhood,
2. being in a man’s world as a female birder in the 1990s to a dinosaur discoverer in C18th (Mary Anning),
3. showing fund raisers around our lab as a PhD student to the misery of skin disease and
4. being crazy about moths to not so crazy about dogs.

Others are still to be finished including two on Taekwondo.

Intense creativity was just part of it; I also got to know some wonderful people.

I had a brief break from poetry drawing a design in AI based on this wonderful chair beside the lake that became the front cover of our course anthology.    

The Genomics Era

The Genomics Era

The BADGEM session at last year’s British Association of Dermatologists conference inspired me to undertake a free online FutureLearn course ‘The Genomics Era’ ( St Georges, University London) to make sure I’m up to date with the technology being used now to study the genome. This had several purposes though; I also wanted to see how online courses work. Although I’ve prepared material for online courses, I had never actually taken part in one. This also gave me an opportunity to see the kind of problems students encounter learning about genes, genomes and the genetic code.

The latest technology, including genome wide association studies (GWAS) and next generation sequencing, make it possible to crack complicated disorders that arise due to defects in multiple genes. A highlight at this year’s BAD conference was hearing Angela Christiano talking about research using GWAS that has revealed new genes associated with alopecia areata, a common hair-loss disorder that can even affect young people. The discovery of these genes has led to treatment that looks extremely promising.

Also this month I’ve gone back in time and learnt about the origins of cell culture. ‘The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot is partly a biography of the patient whose cancer cells became HeLa, one of the most commonly used cell lines used in research. But it also tells, all too painfully, the reason why we now have informed consent since the taking of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks had considerable consequences for her family subsequently. Other shocking revelations in this book were the early experiments that were carried out using HeLa in ignorance.

We have come a long way since the cell culture revolution began with huge discoveries of benefit to mankind but many lessons have been learnt the hard way. We are now in the genomics era which is the next exciting revolution with lots of potential but also lots of ethical issues regarding the sequencing of peoples’ genomes. Let’s hope we can manage it better, with fewer mistakes this time. 

Puddletown Forest Walks

Puddletown forest doesn't have any way marked routes so, during 10 months of walking the puppy, we have come up with a short (brown) and long (blue) walk. The long walk is sometimes extended to include the pond near Thomas Hardy's cottage. The map below I drew for the purposes of recording so I know which 1km square we are in at any one point. I send dragonfly and moth records to Living record and butterflies to the Dorset butterfly conservation website.

Birding, recording and tweeting

Work has been slow coming in this year so I have invested some time in learning how to submit records of moths and dragonflies and how to use twitter to find out what others are seeing locally. White winged black tern is a rare migrant in the UK and one I missed years ago when living in Dundee because I refused to be distracted from my work. This week I finally got to see one in Wareham.

More Meetings in 2014

The other two meetings of 2014 provided me with an update on another previous research field. The British Association of Dermatologists meeting was held in Glasgow and included a new session dedicated to genetic disorders. Key researchers in the field gave updates on the novel therapies that are being tried for these often devastating disorders. Back in the 1990s, when I was doing research into one of the keratin disorders, it seemed a long way in the future before therapy would be possible but now there are promising clinical trials underway. Another breakthrough is in the identification of underlying genes causing some of the remaining disorders that had been tricky back in the 1990s. Thanks to next generation sequencing, a new technology that has revolutionised the way we can look at the genome, it is now possible to find the gene, a vital first step towards understanding what is going wrong with the skin in a genetically inherited disorder.

I was also invited to an Ichthyosis Support Group meeting in Newcastle which was an opportunity to meet patients and their families and understand better what it is like to live with these disorders.

These two meetings were timely, helping me update my lectures on human genetic disorders of the skin that I was due to give in October 2014, for the first time in 6 years. 

Keep wearing the sunscreen

I was fortunate to be able to attend four conferences in 2014. The World Congress on Cancers of the Skin, held in Edinburgh last year was the last one I attended. The talks on the first day covered prevention and seemed rather repetitive as the problems encountered in each country were rather similar.

The next day was on what are generally referred to as non-melanoma skin cancers. This I found much more interesting. The scientific sessions approached the understanding of initiation, progression and spread of these cancers from many angles. I tried to summarize the diversity of the talks I attended in a diagram below. The most fascinating developing area extends beyond the tumour cells themselves. Skin cancer cells require changes to occur in their surroundings as well, providing a permissive stromal (extracellular matrix) and immunological environment to progress. 

The malignant melanoma day followed and was really new to me but equally fascinating especially regarding the progress that has been made with new drugs that inhibit BRAF. However, it is very concerning how many ways the BRAF inhibitors can be evaded and unclear what combination of drugs might be used in the future that will work for every case of malignant melanoma. At the end of the day I was exhausted with the complexity of the disease and really began to think prevention might not be exciting but it is definitely better than any drug combination.

The diagram is based on the talks from the Molecular Science track and plenary sessions. A full list of speakers can be found in the programme at http://www.wccs2014.org/welcome/

Dorset Nightlife

This year I’ve seen scarlet tigers, pink elephants, emeralds, two ghosts and a shark in my garden! It isn’t due to alcoholic excess; I’m actually hooked on moths and their incredible biodiversity. There’s the privet hawkmoth built like a miniature jump-jet only, as a moth, it is pretty sizable filling the length and breadth of a large human palm. Then there’s the equally big contortionist, the poplar hawkmoth that rests with its hind wings in front of its fore wings. The camouflage experts include the bufftip that looks like a bit of peeled off bark, the scorched wing that mimics a dead leaf and the Chinese character rather incongruously named because it looks like a bird dropping. We have also been visited by day flying exhibitionists, the garden and scarlet tigers and the awesome hummingbird hawkmoths that never seem to rest, zipping from flower to flower. In total this year, there have been 111 species trapped in my light-box in just 19 nights, almost double the number of species of butterfly I’ve seen in the UK in a lifetime. 

From Ammonites to Dinosaurs

Having moved to Dorset earlier this year, I spent my 50^th Birthday at the Dinosaur museum in Dorchester, apparently the only UK museum dedicated totally to the subject. We went to entertain my young nephew and niece but I came away totally absorbed by the discovery of the dinosaurs and how big an impact this must have had at the time on religion in particular in the early C19th. I was also surprised that a woman, a poor woman, had succeeded in being a pioneer. ‘She sells sea shells on the seashore’ is a lot better known than Mary Anning, who is thought to be the source of the tongue twister. It presumably refers to the ammonites she and her family collected to sell to tourists to keep them from starvation although these were often referred to as snake stones in her day. They actually remind me far more of sea horses which frequent the other end of the Dorset coast. The ammonites lead to far greater things and not one but several complete fossilized dinosaur skeletons. Most of us involved in scientific research can only dream of a dinosaur moment but should rest assured discovering an ammonite still requires great skill and can make an important and very satisfying find. 

BSID 2014

This drawing is inspired by my recent visit to Newcastle for the British Society for Investigative Dermatology Meeting. The annual dinner was held in the Great Hall at the Discovery Museum, a magnificent venue:
http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/discovery/venue-hire.html

The drawing took me as long as it took the electricity board to fix a power cut in our village this morning. So much for catching up on work after the Easter break!

Inspired by Blickling, Norfolk

A long train journey to Newcastle stimulated this drawing based on a photo I took during a visit to Blickling, a National Trust property in Norfolk several years back. The iron gate made such a wonderful shadow in the sunshine and I have been wanting to try and draw it ever since.

Garden map

I've just moved house and have a wonderful landscaped garden. For my first year here I need to observe and record what is already present before deciding what to change (if anything). So here is my draft map with icons for the plants I have managed to identify.

Fish: Stick to eating them

One of the perks of being self employed is not being constrained to 9-5pm which means you can go to the farmers’ market and the fish market. With the help of ‘fish, the complete fish & seafood companion’ by Mitch Tonks, I’ve been exploring the wide diversity of tasty fish to eat. The gurnard is rather a handsome creature and the curves inspired me to try and draw it. My conclusions from this experiment are 1) cooking & eating them is easier and 2) I better put my identification guide to fish in Great Britain and Ireland on hold.

Drawing a rainbow in AI

When I started learning AI, I soon learnt to use the gradient tool because I was involved in writing a photodermatology review that required a figure of an electromagnetic spectrum. This inspired me to draw a rainbow for fun but I just couldn't find a way to do it with the gradient tool. Finally I realised last night I knew how to do it. First apply a radial gradient to a circle. Next draw a rainbow shape with two circles and a rectangle using the shape builder tool. Then finally make a clipping mask and there is the rainbow.

Dolphin skin

I joined the BBC documentary 'Dolphins; Spy in the Pod' at the point when David Tennant mentioned that Dolphins shed the outer most layer of the skin every three hours. I immediately wanted to see the scientific evidence and found a paper in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology by Hicks et al in 1985 which does indeed suggest a very fast sloughing rate. The microscope images look fascinating but sadly they are in black and white and low power. Back then it was so expensive to publish in colour so we rarely did.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Had a go at a T-shirt logo to raise awareness.

The Plight of the Butterfly

The butterfly theme continues. Inspired by the release of the butterfly stamps last month by the post office I have finally finished this drawing I have been working on for 2 years, 2 months. It probably took about 30 hours in total; I got quicker as time progressed as I learnt the tricks of AI. It shows the critically endangered and endangered species of UK butterflies as listed in Butterflies of Britain & Ireland by Michael Easterbrook in the top half of the hour glass and the wings of those that are extinct in the bottom. The large blue is flying up from the pile in the bottom half because it has been reintroduced since extinction. I spent hours on the wings of the large copper and mazarine blue, the first to become extinct, which are mostly obscured in the final drawing! This is A4 size and not as shown here.

Poor summers aren't just annoying

The poor UK summers aren’t just annoying they are a potential disaster with some of our rarest butterflies on the brink of extinction. An article, Washout 2012, in the summer edition of the Butterfly Conservation magazine prompted me to finish this drawing I’ve been working on, periodically for some months. It represents the potential demise of all our UK butterflies by showing one of the more common species, the peacock, dissolving into a puddle.