Friday, May 11, 2012

My plant tree

My biggest project right now (nearly finished!) is another textbook/notes sorta thing, a lot more technical than the first one. I now know more than I ever thought I would want to about the Krebs cycle and the electron transport chain, and I've spent hours and hours drawing tiny little cells undergoing meiosis and mitosis. On the good side, I can feel my brain expanding. On the bad side, the results aren't really what you'd call decorative.

One exception is the picture I'm showing you here. It's an illustration of "subdivision of kingdom Plantae" (that was my brief, the rest was entirely up to me. Told you my brain was expanding.) I could have just done a tree diagram with the names of the various divisions, but then I thought "tree diagram, har har" and made an actual tree diagram, with examples of plants from every division growing out of it. I'm hoping it will help the students to envision the relationships between the plants better than a plain wordy diagram would have done.



The copyright for this diagram is going to be transferred to the Tshwane University of Technology.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Ink landscapes





















And here's what I've been up to. At least, a bit of what I've been up to.






















These are going to be decorative fillers for a book on, I think, the flora of the Highveld.




















They were originally just going to be simple little doodles.



I guess you could say they grew on me.


The second-last one is my favourite; I'm rather proud of the water reflection.



Now I have to go and draw some more.



P.S. What's worse than breathing in an unidentified insect?