Purple Creative Streak

Digesting a beautiful Madhur Jaffrey fish dish with fenugreek and fennel I became intrigued by the patterns on the cover of her recipe book Curry Easy, wondering how I could achieve the same effect in Ai. Object>path>offset path draws a border around an object but I wanted to have different brush strokes on the outer edge and inner edge. It turned out to be easy; just a couple of snips with the scissor tool (under the eraser) cuts the line into two bits that can be manipulated separately. The flower is just a case of rotating and copying by 30 degrees around a central point.

The idea inspiring this design is that I often wonder (in July/August) how many purple hairstreak butterflies are above the oak canopy, flying in the sun as I walk underneath in the shade. I have only seen these wonderful creatures three times at eye level. And the little brown jobs? They are meant to be the caterpillar. The flower is based on part of the plumage of the under-wing.

Cell Biology Symbols

This week I have finally completed lesson 14 in the Ai ‘Classroom in a book.’ I wonder if I could have completed my e-card for bumblebee conservation before Christmas much more quickly if I’d done this sooner. Creating a symbol allows you to place an object repeatedly with a single click instead of copy>paste>move. However, I also realised from this lesson that it is possible to drag an object with the Alt key to copy and paste it to your chosen position. So easy! So, having discovered this, is there any benefit for creating symbols? Well there are two I can think of: 1) spraying symbols all over the place with a flick of the index finger over the mouse-pad (great for a quick immune infiltrate perhaps?) 2) creating a library of diagram components frequently used in cell biology that can be used between documents and between lab members. So here is a diagram showing some of my symbol library, so far. It never ceases to amaze me how busy the cell membrane must get with all those receptors! It is also possible to make a brush stroke library which is also useful to transfer between documents.

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.