Painted from several photo references in Photoshop CS5, took about 90 min end-to-end.  It’s been awhile since I’ve pushed pixels, and the entire process feels quite foreign and unbearably long.  I got pretty impatient with the details that needed to be filled in half way through, so it ended pretty rough and sketchy.  And then, it was not until the end that I realized that, somewhere along the way, I’ve reflected the tower and #$^&% up the light source :(

Edit 8 Jan: This was in part exploring a way of generating generic, modular art, particularly useful for creating cut-scenes in open-source games.  There’s quite a few things that need to be solved, particularly as it relates to perspective, color harmony, usability, and sheer time required to bang out large number of them.  In a way this is like creating high quality, irregular, non-isometric sprites.  One of the explorative attempt was using vector as the source (seeing that it’s my preference), keeping a simpler style.  I didn’t like the output, however, and the search continues.

Looking back at 2011, I was surprised to find that I’ve uploaded >100 illustrations for WikiCommons (even with a thesis to write/defend, and 3 months hiatus in the Andes & Rockies).  Most of these are simple vectorization requests from the Illustration Workshop that’s nothing to write home about, but a few integrates a breadth of information into interesting figures that I ended up being proud of.  Here’s that gallery.

Chloralkali process illustrates how NaOH and chlorine gas is made by electrolysis.  This figure made extensive use of Illustrator’s symbols feature to generate the population of molecules, and the shape-builder in CS5 for simple construction of the irregular container and “solution” from elementary shapes.

Berimbau parts seeks to prepare a vector image with labelled parts.  The benefit of having information in a vector form (particularly, as a SVG) is that the file itself is a plain-text document that can be easily modified with Notepad, making translation possible with little efforts.  For this particular image, the technical challenge was in converting Illustrator’s gradient meshes to something that can be used by Wikipedia’s SVG engine.  The final process involved converting it to a raster image, Live Trace, and manual tweaking.

SSME schematic shows how fuel and oxidizer gets mixed to provide thrust for a space shuttle.  The illustration was mostly constructed with the pen tool, together with the shape-builder.  The outline layer was lifted and duplicated, with the underlayer converted to a live paint group and painted.  The time consuming part was understanding what is actually going on, given the sources were quite confusing and out of my area of expertise.

Thalamus structure illustrates the different parts of the thalamus… which is once again not in my area of expertise and required outside reading.  (Not that I remember very much about it.)  I’m very fond of expansion to show context and multiple scales.  The human image was a high-resolution raster, with pen tool tracing of outlines.

US Air seating chart – This one I’ve written about before.

Sogen Kato home floor-plan describes the discovery of the mummified body of a “100+ yr old” Japanese man, whose family hides the fact that he was dead in order to keep collecting government cheques for over 30 years.  The image was made with Google Sketchup – my first exposure to the tool.  I’d go on to learn about Sketchup in much more detail later in the year.

Wheat nutrition combines information from multiple sources into one coherent image.  The image is not as nice looking as it was executed – wikipedia’s SVG engine does not support either gradient mesh, symbols (as is), or pattern fills.  It also display SVG fonts inconsistently in thumb-nails and final rendering, and between assigning fonts from Inkscape or Illustrator – that’s one that I still haven’t figured out completely.

Overview of Spectrscopy sought to combine the elements involved in spectroscopy in one image, so that the main text can have visuals to refer to.  There’s a few implicit elements in there coming from teaching spectroscopy for a few years – I think experts would get appreciation of this that novices wouldn’t.  The shapes were constructed with the 3D functions in Illustrator, and this prompted the thought of creating the ongoing OpenChemArt project.  This diagram had been translated into several languages.

Reedbed treatment ponds describes different methods for water treatment.  This is one of the first “ambitious” images I tried to make for wikipedia, combining multiple sources of information and representing them in a coherent way.  The single-point perspective was drawn in as is – in CS5 (which I didn’t upgrade to until August) there’s a new perspective tool which might have been useful.

In 2012 I’d like to explore “messier”, painterly vectors.  It’d require some formal trial-and-error to see where the limitations of SVG in Wikipedia arises.  I’d probably also get myself into the raster realm again, since that’s likely where I’ll be when working with the iOS apps I’d like to write on the side.

—–

The to-do list in the upcoming weeks doesn’t involve any other instructional chemistry spreads (sorry).  I’ve a paper that I should really spend time on; there’s several history infographics that I started a few days ago; 3 pages on olfaction; the Pictorial Thesis; the S America trip; history of lipids.  And a narrative comic.  And a poster of balloon-repertoire… argh!  

On the learning side, I’ve been doing lots of anatomy books, and trying to work out a workflow to partially automate the production of a bank of vector graphics.  The goal is to seed a large repository of 10k high-quality vector images pertaining to chemistry which can be easily used by everyone via ChemDraw/ChemDoodles/Powerpoint etc (“Open Chem Art”).  No cigars so far.

Relating to chemistry: I went to my first symposium in Hong Kong today, organized by a govn’ established nanotech company and industry groups.  I marveled at how product-driven the work over this side is (this side of the Pacific, and the academic-industry divide): almost everything (is made to?) seem like it’s about to be incorporated in a commercial product.  The talks themselves flip back and forth between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, and everyone seems to understand all the languages perfectly.  I enjoyed the symposium thoroughly, and should find out if the local universities open up their seminars to the public.

As usual, clicking on the figure opens a larger version for viewing.  A PDF version for print is available here. I’m not too happy with the final output – I feel as if the spatially-suggested connection between the analogy and the phenomena to be explained is not clear enough.  Suggestions to make this more useful / analogy more clear is appreciated.

Update (17 Dec 2011 Revision R3): The addition of the imagine/now consider label seems to clear up the analogy-phenomena.  I thank Loïc Samuel for the suggestion.

Side-note: a number of people have been looking for this to be published in the last year.  If you’re one of them… I’m sorry for the tardiness!  NMR is the flagship of organic structure identification, revealing much more information than techniques like IR; the corollary is that interpreting NMR is a bigger and more nuanced topic than comparable techniques (on both interpretation and theoretical grounds).  I’ve been going back-and-forth the drawing board to select the right amount of content to include in this overview, and what to reserve for others.  Hopefully this final version is a good compromise.  I encourage and appreciate your comments and questions, and will make updates to the spread with your feedback.

Side-note 2:  Do you speak another language and would like to see this translated?  Contact me and we’ll try to work something out.

Update (R4, 15 Dec 2011):  Updated with corrections.  I thank Shaun MacLean (U of Manitoba) and James Ashenhurst (Mastering Organic Chemistry) for their helpful suggestions.

Click on the image for a larger display, or follow this link for the PDF version.

On the other note, magis Eric Jones had graciously granted permission for the Pivot Switch manuscript to see the light, and I’ve hosted an early draft here.  The Pivot Switch is a variation of Eric’s Eclipse move.  The sleight lets you secretly switch out a card during a casual display for up to three cards.  It’s angle-friendly, it’s clean, and it’s one-handed.  The final version will be hosted on Eric’s website (and possibly here) as a free download for the magic community; feel free to send forth feedback, comments, and improvements as the draft evolves into the final version.

The other aside: the ChemSocRev article is in print and finally have page numbers.  Yay!

An examples of the finished illustration.  We’ll briefly cover the processes in (i) cutting the shapes, (ii) extrusion parameters, (iii) 3D-2D conversion, and (iv) touch-ups.

Cutting the Shapes

There are several operations that generate 3D shapes, including extrusion, revolution, and rotation.  They are useful for 3D-objects of different symmetry, and their effects on a 60% transparent shape are shown below.

All of these rely on first generating a path to be operated upon.  The tensegrity sticks need to have volume, and have no rotational symmetry; they are a clear candidate for extrusion.  To generate the outline I simply removed two (small) rectangles from a large rectangle using the ShapeBuilder tool.  To soften up the shapes a little, the corners were rounded with the Effect -> Stylize -> Rounded Corners effect.  This last round-corner operation has the side-effect of generating more anchor points, and dirty up the 3D effect somewhat later on.

At the end of this operation I inverted the fill and stroke (shortcut: shift-X), to generate a shape with purple fill and null stroke.  The reason for this is to simplify the resulting expanded appearance (see next section).

Extrusion Parameters

The extrusion parameters control both the visual appearance of the 3D object, as well as the properties of the expanded 2D appearance.  For example, with simple shapes like this, the appearance of Diffuse and Plastic shading may appear identical, but the expanded objects are constructed differently, and this affects what subsequent operations can be made.  The following figure systematically shows what the different options do.  The first three are of identical extrusion parameters, but different stroke/fill options; the remainder shows the effects of varying extrusion parameters.  The lower row shows the outlines after the appearances have been expanded.

Because I’m interested in generating the cleanest outline, I went with a fully opaque fill (and no stroke) on the H-shaped paths, and extruded with no bevels.  The various copies were then placed on one another in proper Z-order.

3D-2D conversion

At this point I duplicated everything on a new layer and hid the layer containing the 3D objects (select all, copy, new layer, paste in place; toggle visibility of lower 3D layer).  This gives us something to fall back on. The appearance was then expanded (Object -> Expand Appearance) to give easily worked with paths.  The strokes were set to black 0.75, and we have ourselves a mostly OK illustration!  Note that the fill cannot be set to null; otherwise the previously masked back-faces will be exposed.  A white fill should be used instead (on the expanded appearances) if plain outlines are to be obtained.

Note that stray lines will be present for more complicated shapes.  For those cases, manual intervention will be necessary.  For the tensegrity illustrations, the rounded corners present some of these elements, and they’re cleaned up where needed.

Touch-ups

The forward-backward ordering of entire objects works well in many cases, but not for interlocked objects.  For example, the purple stick on the right should be between the blue sticks, not under; but this is not compatible with its need to be partially behind the back green stick.

We simply need to touch up the rest, in this case, by drawing over the offending blue-stick, using the Eyedropper tool (shortcut: I) to match the style and color.

Other graphic elements are drawn in a new layer over the sticks to ensure their visibility.  At this point, all of the elements can be quickly manipulated and stylized to will, something that would have been time-consuming to do were it constructed as raster graphics.

The procedure outlined here, once worked out, is convenient, flexible, and quick to scale up, at the expense of perfect perspective and realism.  As with most things graphics, there are numerous ways of going about this — feel free to let me know of alternatives in the comments!

Alejandro with the Illustrations at a Craft Fair

• I signed myself up as a United Nations volunteer, with an available date of March 2012.  It’s probable that I won’t be called up, but there is a chance that I will be serving for a year at remote locales.
• I’m looking into teaching the International Baccalaureate (IB) at the diploma level, and as jobs trickle out in Jan-Feb for September 2012 I’ll get a better feel for whether I’m “suitably qualified”.
• I’ll try my hand at a chemistry picture-book in the next few months, and if I have sufficient skills, discipline, and there is a reasonable chance that I can find an audience, I shall give it more time.  The location for that work may be in Canada, Hong Kong, or somewhere else — I’m still feeling out the environment after a few days here.
• If neither of the above works out, I’m tempted to take on either a M.Ed. in Peace Education (Costa Rica!  Universidad para La Paz!), or a formal teaching certificate (whereabouts unknown).

And of course, if anything unexpected and meaningful comes up, I’ll be open-minded.

In the mean time, my plate will be pretty full here in Hong Kong, as I’ve managed to draw up several pages of to-do-list while I was traveling.  There’s a long list of picture-articles I want to write (stay tuned!); translations of the IR-illustration that I need to complete; the grand cyclodextrin channel JACS paper that Tom and I will soon be submitting; the wikipedia synthetic channel article; some coding projects (many coding projects); and so on so forth (ahhhh!).  I’m also looking at some online-teaching positions that seems to align with my skills and interest.

On the non-grownup side, I’ll probably be training capoeira, swimming, and practicing Ashtanga yoga daily again.  I’m going to learn the guitar (so I can play accompaniment when teaching the ocarina) while working through some painful flute exercises for a few months (Moyse/Tafanel).  Looking into volunteering opportunities, and signed up for a Latin course.  I suspect not everything will happen as regularly as I hope, since family takes up much more time than I anticipated.  Ah well, c’est la vie.

More another time — as jet-lag goes away and the initial block of reunions finish, there will be more intellectually interesting updates to these pages.  See you then!  (On that note, the pages themselves will likely be moved to Squarespace, a grid-hosted solution, now or in several months’ time; it seems much more responsive than the WordPress install I have on Dreamhost.)

I prepared to write about my South American journeys later with a drawing tablet in hand, aided by excellent write-ups and pictures of trip-mates.  Climbing Villarrica in Pucon, however, was an experience unique to me.  This entry will thus be out of order with the others in this series.

Pucon is a small town in the Chilean Patagonia, west of the Andes.  We arrived at Pucon from Puerto Varas after crossing the Andes from Bariloche.

Chile is a country with incessant earthquakes and countless volcanoes.  Several active volcanoes are nearby Pucon, with Villarrica being an accessible one about an hour’s drive away.  This is late September, the end of winter in the southern hemisphere, and the snow covers a greater extent than seen in this satellite map from Google.

Climbing the volcano is one of the attractions here: others have written about their adventures (and attempts) here, here, and here.  While their records are from the summer, our attempt is on a windy winter day and weather makes much difference in the scenery and conditions for the climb.  (The summer picture courtesy of AroundThisWorld.)  Amongst the difference is the number of trekkers: while in summer there would be up to 300 making the attempt, there was only about a hundred that I’ve met on the day.

At 8am we began our hike from the parking lot, where the snow more-or-less ends, at an altitude of 1400m.   On our trip was Oscar and Patricia, our local guides; Claire, an Irish gal; Rosie from Edmonton; and Filip from Belgium, all of us in our early 30s.

After the first hour the snow and incline required us to zig-zag in single file up the mountain; at the end of which we put on the crampons (spikes on the bottom of shoes), as there begins significant passages where the surface is too steep and icy for hiking boots.  We also brought out the ice-picks, for balance, and to arrest a fall.

Another hour of slow climb brought us to the end of the ski lifts and lounges, where roads would reach and hikes would begin in summertime.  We lost Claire at this point; the hiking boots supplied by the trekking company did not fit her and makes a hard climb impossible.

Yet another hour came and gone, and the terrain was steeper than before.  Rests are less frequent as many parts are steep enough to make stopping precarious.  Finally we reached “The Chapel”, the structure protruding from the snow in the left in the next picture, a ski-lift shelter destroyed by Villarrica’s 1971 eruption.

Several larger groups of 15-20 camped out, or plain turns back at this point.  Filip had major blisters (from wearing two pair of socks), but braved on for another hundred meters to catch sight of the top; the structure of the volcano was such that what appeared to be the end was actually some two hours before the real thing.  The climb was arduous and it was disheartening to learn that we have barely crossed the half-way mark.

The remaining path would become harder, as the ground becomes increasingly icy, and sounds of broken glass accompany every footstep.  The winds up here are stronger than where we started, and looking back down it seems as if a faux pas will send us tumbling down. The view, however, was striking, for which my pictures do not do them justice – I had difficulties removing gloves and fish for the camera (while keeping the gloves from flying away – which would be certain end of the expedition), and the touch-screen/electronics was simply not working properly in the freezing temperature.  Note the clouds in the picture – we will cross the layer up in the remaining time.

I had a lingering cough and IT band injuries on both knees before the hike, and soreness goes and returns with every step.  Strange for a failed catholic and failed Portuguese learner, all I repeated to myself in the next hour was “O Senor e meu pastor, e nada me faltara” that I once saw on a boat in Brazil; Portuguese for Psalms 23 “The Lord is my pastor, and I shall miss nothing”.

By the 4-hour mark Oscar accompanied Rosie down; our tough Canadian girl was one of the 15-20 to make it to that point.  I could do little than keeping my head down, counting left-right-left-right one step at a time as I kick out footholds and puncture the ice with the pick.

The last hour was brutal.  The ground was covered in crystalline bands of ice about 15cm/7″ in width, neatly stacked on top of one another (presumably these formed in the direction of the prevailing winds?)  Every step required double-kicking to carve footholds in these solid ice, and the climb grew to a constant 40-60 grade, at times veering into crawling territory.

The winds were relentless, and often Oscar and I found ourselves braced against the wall (“strong legs!” as he admonished in accented English), picking up our feet only when the wind eased off.  Blasts of ice hit our face and sun-glasses constantly, and larger chunks tumbling down from above hits the helmet with loud noises.  My right hip was sore, and the soreness in the knees is now a stabbing pain, but on these slope there was no rest for the weary.

The last skiers have turned back, and left were Oscar and I, and two ahead of us.  I was later told that we were the only ones to make it to the crater that day (trodden and head down, remember?) – they must have been only 15-20 minutes away from the summit.  It took everything I had but I made it.  Going the distance gave me a tremendous sense of accomplishment, but it was very humbling to think that for a living Oscar climb this every other day.

There was about 20m/60ft of flat near the top, before it drops off to the center of the earth.  The sight inside was abit of a disappointment, especially since I climbed Etna while it erupted in 99′.  This time there was no lava to jump nor fresh obsidian to pry apart; the magma was not even visible since the gas was too overwhelming.  Hot sulphurous fumes were everywhere, and I suspect it might be SO3 that forms H2SO4 in the lungs and windway, as everything burns and my eyes and nose waters and tears.  I was fascinated with the textures inside the caldera and wish I know more about the processes that make them the way they are.

The endless view of everywhere else from the top (2840m) was wonderful, but almost every picture I took had gloves in front of the lens.  We were only able to stand the fumes for several minutes before gasping for non-toxic air.

The normal way of coming down would be by sliding down the little plastic tobaggan we carried up in our pack, using our picks to control the speed.  The icy conditions today, however, means that we need to walk back down for about 1.5 hours before being able to do that.  But that was fun, and the day ended with Oscar waving to the peak, “See you tomorrow”.

Aftermath: The base of the palms were bruised from slamming down the pick some ten thousand times, and I limped about for a day as the right hip and both knees would not bend without pain.  There was, surprisingly, no blisters at all – during the climb it certainly feels as if the ankles were rubbed raw.  The sulfur smell lingered either on or in me even after showers.  The ego got a healthy boost for being able to put down a feat of solid determination, and it was a good night’s sleep that night indeed.