As I mentioned before, one of my ongoing projects is to illustrate poems about chemistry that were written by an old classmate of mine so she can publish her collection. Here are some sketches I did in Illustrator (after doing many many versions of them with pencil and paper). Ultimately I'll do them in pen and ink with ink wash, which is why they are not in color.

The first one deals with kinetics. No matter how thermodynamically favored the romance between these star-crossed reactants may be, they need to find each other to react. The middle sketch is for a poem about neon gas, and the laws to which it must adhere. And finally, this tortured barium dreams of breaking free of his latticed prison and the loveless marriage to two fluorine atoms. Sadly, his hopes for solubility are dashed by the common ion effect.