I thought it would be helpful to post about projects I undertake that fail, or those that take a lot of iterations to get to the final product. Below is the pile of earlier versions of the crochet fatty acids from the membrane granny square. It took dozens of attempts to work out a pattern for this piece:
This week I uploaded a piece of work to the Twitter SciArt Community group as part of SciArtSeptember activity for scientific illustrators to share their work. The work shared by members of this amazingly talented group is phenomenal. And then there’s my contribution….
This piece was rushed, designed and completed in a couple of hours (whilst the kids were still on school hols, so with Roblox and The Simpsons in the background). The prompt for day 1 was the word “Survivor” which immediately made me think of my favourite microbe Deinococcus radiodurans. This bacterium has an amazing ability to withstand radiation and repair itself following exposure, making it a microbe of significant interest in both the biotech and health industries (click here for link to a Nature Micro Reviews article on this bacterium). Hence, I couldn’t resist having a go at making something! Here is the end result (this picture here shows what I was aiming for):
Needless to say this was not how I imagined the final piece was going to look. I don’t regret submitting it, it was very different from the other pieces uploaded for that day which perhaps shows a different perspective on the topic. And whilst making the piece, I came up with loads of new ideas for future pieces of work, which I guess was one of the goals of the exercise? So, in some ways it was a success 😜.
PS My 10 year old thinks it looks like butt cheeks….