Got the cover!

Congratulations Weerapana lab and thanks for the great project!

Goofing around

I'm not sure at what point I thought this might be a viable option for cover art, but luckily I caught myself shortly after the brainstorm. The journal in question does often have cartoons on the cover that can be goofy, but this is a serious stretch. It's obviously a work-in-progress. The client liked it and wants to use it on the lab website, which is why I am finishing it. The sulfonyl fluoride molecule is a covalent activity-based inhibitor with great selectivity for a certain class of hydrolases. 

Late light bulb shines in vain

This happens to me a lot. I come up with the perfect birthday present for someone the day before their birthday even though I've been brainstorming for weeks. I spend hours the night before class preparing my lecture but can only see exactly how best to explain a concept 5 minutes before class starts. This doesn't often happen in my illustration work, but it just did. I was tasked with coming up with cover art from scratch in under two weeks, and given free reign to conceptualize the paper. It's certainly not a demanding or even unusual timeline, it just doesn't leave as much time for brainstorming. Yesterday I submitted the image below, which I'm perfectly happy with, but today, a day before the deadline, I come up with a way better idea. Now I'm kicking myself, or at least whatever mysterious part of myself produces ideas whenever it feels like it and too often not when I'm trying really hard to make it do so. I'll just have to keep the idea in my back pocket for now.

Four stages of tumor progression project done!

Here is the cover of the brochure for which my four stages of tumor development illustrations were made. They appear separately within the brochure, but the designers also used them as a design element on the cover they designed. I'm not sure if they meant for the man to have his mouth agape in mock horror or if the cell just happens to be there. Either way, I love the design. Now I want to place all of my artwork nestled inside a DaVinci man silhouette like this one. But I will refrain. I guess.

How very European of me

That's right, I took the month of August off from updating my website. No, I didn't spend it on an island in the Mediterranean. I couldn't share one of the projects I was working on due to a confidentiality agreement, but of course that doesn't account for an entire month. Here's what else I did on my August vacation. I taught 17 undergraduates how to derive the rate law for the reaction between bleach and blue food coloring and how to tell the difference between plaster of paris, chalk, and baking soda in the lab. I learned how to make interactive animations using Adobe Edge (the Apple device-friendly follow-up to Flash) for a textbook project I'm working on. I drove to Lake Tahoe and back with the husband and our 9 month old force of nature.  And most recently, I put together the figure below (a draft) for a bioinformaticist who is seeking ways to engineer a synthetic organism with a minimal genome. To this end, his group has explored the possibility of creating a genome that only uses 19 amino acids instead of 20. This figure describes their efforts to do without cysteine residues. Turns out there are a small handful of cysteines whose chemistry is just too important to be removed or replaced by something else. The PI behind this work was inspired by a lipogram which was a rewriting of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" that completely lacked the letter "e".  It's called "Black Bird". People in the biz are always looking for examples of science being inspired by art, and I think this is a particularly interesting one.

 

No animals were harmed in the making of this illustration

For a project I'm currently working on, I needed to draw a mouse with a tumor. In doing this, I came across a neat trick for depicting fur. In Photoshop, you just go to the Filter menu and choose Noise -> Add noise, and go to about 10%. Then, add a motion blur from the same Filter menu. It's not the most realistic but I think it's not bad for a mouse that is just a part of a larger illustration and partially obscured by a Kaplan-Meier plot. 

A quick Saturday afternoon animation

methylationanimationv3 from Mary O'Reilly on Vimeo.

This was a fun project made very easy by the fact the client had already picked out the colors and shapes. I just had to draw them and make them boogie. Her lab recently published a paper on the structure of a protein complex that undergoes some fancy gymnastics to perform methylation chemistry, and she just wanted something fun to show at the end of talks. Of course the structures themselves are much more beautiful, but the crowd will have gotten a nice eye-full by the end, and this helps to actually see what's going on. While I worked on this, our own little gymnast was keeping the husband on his toes. I guess I always knew that babies are strong and fearless, but I had no idea that they are so lightning fast too. It's a portentous trifecta and we're just trying to keep up.

 

Back to the drawing board

Here's an update to a project I posted about on May 29th. I had just come up with a new design for this website graphic about ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. Well, two things happened. One was that we decided to scrap autophagy and focus on the selectivity of the proteasome pathway for a particular topology of ubiquitination. To convey selectivity, we needed many more ubiquitinated target proteins, which were literally depicted as targets. The other thing was that I needed to restrict the palette to black, white, gray, and red. So when I incorporated those changes, what I ended up with was so hypnotic it would have made Tim Burton nauseous. After quickly scrapping that, I instead decided to use the already gray background of the website as a chalkboard. This is what I came up with. In addition to showing selectivity, it's meant to demonstrate the steps to degradation, namely binding of the ubiquitins, de-ubiquitination, unfolding of the target protein, and finally proteolysis. By the way, this was done completely with the Wacom pen tablet, which I now love!

Four stages of cancer growth, updated and with color

Stage 1: Something goes wrong in a cell

Stage 2: Cancer cell growth spins out of control

Stage 3: Tumors metastasize

Stage 4: Cancer cells refuse to die

So if I post four images at a time, it's okay if I only post every two weeks...  right? These images are for a brochure being put out by a non-profit medical research institute. What's great about this brochure is that a design firm is taking the images and laying them into the brochure, and through the magic of graphic design, making them look way cooler than they appear here.  The color scheme is one that they use throughout the brochure to represent the four stages. I had to find a way to incorporate these four different colors while making sure it remains clear which are the cancer cells and which are the normal cells. So I decided to use the colors as the "glow" around the cells gone awry (aka the cancer cells). Which means that as much as I like having the yellow glow around the apoptotic (dying) cells, it has since occurred to me that it has to go. C'est la vie.

Friday nights just aren't what they used to be.

After a long week of drawing, teaching, and parenting, there's nothing I like better to do than find an old twistie-tie in the junk drawer, mold it into a right-handed helix, and sketch it from seven different angles. Oh, and then write a sarcastic blog post about it. These are going to be templates for a new project I just started that will have DNA in the illustration. It's a tight deadline, so it was fortuitous that the husband had plans for a much deserved night out with the guys tonight. Ooohh... maybe next I'll fashion a transcription factor out of some dryer lint. Or, maybe it's time I start planning a night out myself.

Four stages of tumor progression, updated again

Here's the latest on the project I posted about on May 15th and April 24th. There's been a bit of a change in course since the clients decided that instead of their original idea of having the illustration stretch across a fold-out page, they want four separate images. What's nice is that it makes the problem of scale much simpler. Each image has its own frame of reference. What is not nice is that in stage 2 (upper right) the image looks not so much like uncontrolled cell growth as it does like a small turtle has gotten loose in this scene of normal, healthy cells. But that can (and will) be fixed. I only had a few days to turn around these new sketches, so the wily turtle made it through this round, but his days are numbered. He will slowly inch his way out of the picture as I find a better way to represent a ball of tumor cells. 

Cover art issue out

On Aprill 11 I posted a sketch for this project, and here it is all done. It's on the inside cover of this week's Angewandte Chemie, which you can see here.

I'm back to teaching this week after taking the spring semester off. Nothing like an entire semester of g-chem in 6 weeks to yank me back into reality. This is the same course I taught last fall during the last three or so months of my pregnancy. So I am pretty sure the baby is ready to dominate the AP exam.

 

Well, Hello there you old dusty Wacom

About 3 years ago I bought a Wacom pen tablet, which is basically like the device you use to electronically give your signature when you use your credit card at the grocery store, but for drawing. I played around with it a bit and then secretly, subconsciously, and guiltily, realized that I didn't like it very much and went back to my old fashioned pencils and sketchbook. I dug it out again last week because I knew how much faster I could make several different variations on a sketch if I used it. So I dusted it off and set it up to work in Photoshop. Unlike in Illustrator (or at least as far as I can tell so far), Photoshop lets me use it like the old school pens that change line width based on how hard you press down on the paper. This revelation alone secured the pen tablet's position on my desk for the foreseeable future. And indeed, I was able to bang out three designs based on the scribbles above.

But the best part is that it took me far less time to realize that I didn't like any of these designs, and within a day of sending them to the client, I came up with the new idea shown below (in the place where I'm convinced 99% of ideas are born, the shower). I shouldn't be doing this but here is a tip to any prospective clients who may be reading this. When I send you initial drafts, if you have the time to spare, wait a few days before responding. Rather than coming to the obvious conclusion that you are extraordinarily busy, which you undoubtedly are, I will assume that you are trying to come up with a gentle way to tell me that you don't like any of the drafts, causing me to redouble my efforts to come up with something better in the meantime. Thanks to the Wacom, those initial ideas that must be waded through to get to the better ones won't cost very much.

This project is a design for an academic lab's home page, and highlights their work on the role of ubiquitination in regulating proteolysis and autophagy of intracellular proteins.

Attack of the smog-eating bacteria

Here's an update to "Traffic Jam" from May 1st. It will be submitted as possible cover art, so the blank space at the top is where the title would go. I like this idea better (and more importantly so does the client), but there's something still bothering me about it. I think it has something to do with the photo I took but I'm not sure so I open it up periodically and look at it with fresh eyes.  Maybe it's that I don't want the trees to be green. Hey, it never occurred to me before that I could bring a yearned-for autumn to San Diego with Photoshop. Surprising considering the hordes of pretty people here who have that healthy, just-airbrushed appearance to them.

Four stages of tumor progression, updated

I posted an initial sketch for this illustration here on April 24th. One way I've been trying to continue to improve my work is to make more thumbnail sketches. It's a good way to find the best composition. But this time I may have overdone it. I just counted, and I apparently made no fewer than 24 sketches for this project. Obsess much? This is the first digital version, still in greyscale because I will have some direction in terms of the color palette.

This is not a mommy blog

But I finally decided what to do with a blank wall in the baby's room (only five months after he was born, but whatever) so I thought I'd share. I just wanted some colorful, high-contrast images on the wall, but I didn't like any of the commercially available wall decals that I could find. Turns out babies love to look at faces too, so I whipped these up in Adobe Illustrator and now he can look at his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins whenever he wants. After printing these out I changed my mind about the order of placement, so some of the color choices are nagging at me now, but not nearly as much as the blank wall did.

Traffic jam

This image is not final, it's really just an idea. Acetogenic bacteria can live on carbon dioxide, but in order to do so, a key reaction must take place. It seems simple - a methyl group is transferred from folate to vitamin B12 (the molecule shown here). But a number of proteins must organize themselves and undergo what the authors of this work call "molecular gymnastics". They used X-ray crystallography to obtain a complete picture of this process, and remarkably show that the requisite conformational changes even occur in the protein crystals. To get the photo for this piece, I went to the pedestrian overpass at 5:00pm last Friday expecting the freeway to look like a parking lot. I found myself ambivalent about what I saw. The photo is not as striking, but I suppose I should be happy for the earth?

Four stages of tumor progression

This is a rough sketch of an illustration I'm doing for a brochure for a non-profit research institute. I skipped a week of posting because we were on vacation. It was our first trip with the baby, and I daresay we all three scarcely emerged unscathed. I meant to post this sketch, which I finished the day before we left, while we were on the road, but if you've ever traveled with an infant, you will not be surprised that it didn't happen. That said, I was able to get a little bit of work done. After the baby went to bed, I worked on another sketch while standing at the sink of the hotel bathroom where the light wouldn't wake him up, then took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to my client in Germany. I guess the flip side of being able to do this job from anywhere is that I am never really on vacation.