Dreams and Nightmares

Here's a project I did for my Photoshop class, which is part of the Digital Design Certificate program I'm enrolled in. Out of a few options, I chose the dreams and nightmares theme, and incorporated a few of my recurring nightmares using most of the Photoshop tools I've learned to date in the class. The pattern-making tool is one of my newest favorites. My feet are supposed to be huge and heavy, making it impossible to run away from whatever is chasing me. It may just look like I'm sporting bell bottom pajamas though.

And no more shall we part

This is an oil painting of my grandmother that I did during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, from a black and white photo taken when she had been about the same age. I painted it two years after she passed away, following a struggle with Parkinson's disease, and gave it to my grandfather hesitantly, not knowing whether he would want a painful reminder of a much happier time of his life.

My grandfather had retired from his career as an engineer to care for her, and found himself, at 72, wondering what he would do with himself now that she was gone. His biggest fear was to be idle, so he followed a calling, the seed of which had been planted decades earlier, and became a Catholic priest. Since then, he has served his community tirelessy and grieved for his wife daily. This painting hung above his fireplace. Every time I saw him, he told me that he talked to her every day, while assuring me, lest I be concerned, that she had not started talking back yet. 

Yesterday, on what would have been his 88th birthday, we gathered the family together for his funeral, a service attended by two bishops and enough priests to keep everyone on their very best behavior. I borrowed the title of this post from a Nick Cave song, because I think what comforts the family most right now is the thought that he is finally reunited with his beloved wife.

Thin Layer Chromatography

This week my part-time teaching job has felt a bit like a full-time teaching job. No complaints about that at all, it just means that the only thing I've really sketched this week is ideas for ways to explain the concept of thin layer chromatography to my organic chemistry students. No perspective, no shading, just trying to use simple images to make a complicated subject easier to wrap their minds around. Good thing my students are bright.

Fossil find in Soho

Just came back from a weekend in New York, celebrating a handful of family milestones with my truly delightful in-laws and getting to see some great friends. While walking through Soho with husband, we came across The Evolution Store, which I hadn't heard of but was drawn to by the sign outside advertising the meeting of science and art within.  It's a tiny space bursting at the seams with ancient fossils, human (and other) skulls, rare minerals, and taxodermied animals. In a puzzling juxtaposition, a taxodermied raccoon sits atop the glass counter holding a basket full of male raccoon genitalia bones. Anyway, we found this ammonite, a now extinct marine animal, particularly beautiful. I also chose it because I was facing a birthday, and it is hard to feel old in the presence of a 120 million year old fossil.

Everything is connected

These icons represent just a portion of what's going on in Mycoplasma genitalium, even though it's the smallest known free-living bacterium, and has one of the smallest genomes ever found. Understanding how all of these processes communicate between one another to keep the organism thriving is a huge feat, and I am excited to be peripherally involved (if only artistically) in the effort.

Now wait just a dipole moment.

Just getting psyched for the first day of organic chemistry lab, when the students will use a molecular modeling software program to learn about polarity of molecules in preparation for week 2 - thin layer chromatography!

Safety first (or, my new pencil holder)

This week I am gearing up to teach a couple of undergraduate chemistry labs, and have been hearing a lot about safety. This pencil holder, which I recently repurposed from a broken cassette tape deck adaptor, is a good reminder of what can happen to monsters who attack pencil-wielding prey if they do not first put on a pair of safety goggles. PPE is no joke people!

Creepy disembodied extremeties

I've had the very good fortune to get to know a talented and well known medical illustrator around here. I've talked to him about my plans and gotten some very good advice. From our first conversation he's been curious about my past and ongoing fine art training, reminding me that no matter how many cool tricks I can pull off in Illustrator, it is important to stay strong in the fundamentals. When I told him we had to draw our hand in class, he told me we should have been drawing our hands and feet about 20 times, using different types of pencils, methods of shading, and lengths of time. So, here are some of my attempts. The sketches took anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. They were done with charcoal or pencils at 6 or softer. Some are blended, some are not. 8 down, 12 to go. Or is it 32 to go? The topmost sketch is the one I did today. The foot in the last panel is not bleeding, it's just a smudge.

Adolescent angst for B cells

In order for pre-B cells to fully mature, they need a functional B cell receptor. Now here's a discovery proving yet again that carbohydrates are worth paying attention to. Turns out, the pre-B cell receptor has a crucial asparagine-linked glycosylation site, and taking it away leaves these inexperienced cells trapped in limbo and unable to progress to maturity. Hmm... like grad school?

For the full story see Ubelhart et al. Nature Immunology 2010, 11(8), 759.

Getting a handle on the O-GlcNAc modification

Protein glycosylation is usually relegated to the cell surface and intracellular compartments. In a fascinating exception to this rule that was first observed in the 1980's, A GlcNAc monosaccharide can be added to serine and threonine residues of cytosolic proteins. Many labs are trying to understand the dynamic regulation of the addition and removal of this sugar that seemingly has a hand in every cellular process and disease state known to man. More and more examples are being found to suggest that this modification and phosphorylation regulate each other, as if they weren't already complicated enough on their own.

There are a handful of ways to detect O-GlcNAc, which have helped build the laundry list by telling us which proteins are modified. Now, in a recent Nature Chemical Biology paper from Linda Hsieh-Wilson's lab at CalTech, they show us a useful new method that reveals what proportion of any particular protein is modified (2%? 80%), and of those that are modified, exactly how many GlcNAc residues there are per protein. They do this by adding a great big heavy tag (polyethylene glycol) to the modification, which makes the protein sluggish on a polyacrylamide gel. Proteins that have been modified then resolve as separate slower-moving bands on the gel according to how many GlcNAc residues adorn them.  I made the illustration above for a highlight of the paper that will appear in the Functional Glycomics Update, a collaboration between the Consortium for Functional Glycomics and the Nature Publishing Group. The image will be much smaller than you see here, which is why I took kind of a loose style for the protein, playing around with the paint brush tools in Illustrator. I haven't actually decided whether I like it or not, but this is where I am with it.

Scenes from Indianapolis airport

Just got back from a brief but fun trip to my hometown to visit family and friends. Airports are great places to sketch. People are preoccupied, but at the same time relatively still, since we spend most of the time there waiting. For a couple of these sketches I even had 5 minutes or more before the pose shifted or they left to board a flight. As far as I could tell, no one noticed me drawing them. (Beware of creepy airport sketchers!) Once I got caught doing this in a Starbucks. My subject started striking poses worthy of a Madonna video, totally embarrassing me.

Bar code series

Okay, the truth is I've just been tying up loose ends over the past couple of days and I don't have anything new and exciting to share. This was an assignment I did several months ago for an illustration course. We were given words or phrases and told to illustrate them while somehow incorporating a bar code. Here is what I came up with for anatomy, architecture, games, music, and red light district.

Latest installment of chemistry poetry illustrations

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.

Crayons, please?

Since I was thinking about the project I had lined up for the weekend, I did this rough sketch on a white board at husband's workplace while waiting for him to finish up on Friday evening. So, apparently I am seven. On the bright side, I did not get fussy.

Cover Me!

I'm about to submit a manuscript to a journal that invites authors to send in possible cover art with initial submission of the manuscript. Here's a mock-up. I took into account the placement of the title, which is why there's some empty space. I'll be happy just to have the paper accepted, but wouldn't mind getting the cover too! It's about our discovery that the cell surface receptor CD22 recycles back to the cell surface after endocytosis, and that it differentially transports cargo into the cell, depending on the cargo. Fingers crossed!

Brushing up on a different medium

Sorry, I couldn't resist the punny title. This weekend I've been playing around with using pen and ink with an ink wash on watercolor paper for some illustrations.  Here are a couple of prototypes in progress.

Tribute to Husband

It's about time I give some credit to the source of many of the human forms I use in my drawings - my husband. He's always willing when I need to snap a reference photo to capture a pose, or even just an ear, like this:

He doesn't even ask what it's for, he's just happy to help. The best part is, he's funny. When I asked him to help me simulate the heimlich manuever, I had no idea that he was going to look straight into the camera with such a look of deep concern. I laughed the entire time I drew this:

Sometimes he requests that I change his appearance so that he is not recognizable, and I oblige.

Whether it's for a column in the AWIS magazine

or an assignment for my graphic design class

he never complains. As if it weren't enough that he is extraordinarily supportive of my "alternate career" or "career away from the bench" or whatever the kids are calling it these days, he is always behind the scenes with a keen eye for design. He is the one who reins me in when I want to write a line of text in the shape of an elephant just because I learned how to use the type on path tool in Illustrator. Plus, he knows all of the lyrics to Pinball Wizard. I'm a lucky lady, I am.

A Few Good Women

Here's an infographic I made yesterday for the next issue of the Association for Women in Science's quarterly magazine, the theme of which is Leadership. The statistics come from articles going into the issue, and are meant to highlight the relative dearth of female role models in leadership positions. I suppose I must be one of the lucky ones, because I have had no shortage of outstanding female role models throughout my entire training.