Personal army of diplomonads (doodle)

Accidentally discovered the Symbols tool in Illustrator, and had a little too much fun creating a personal army of swirling multi-coloured diplomonads:
They really remind me of diodes. Incidentally, they can also invade diagrams and make them barely legible:
Aren't you glad I haven't gotten around to making cartoon-y spiders and cockroaches yet?

In other news, I'm rather swamped for the next week and a half (as if I wasn't before), as laws of the universe mandate that right between classes and finals not only do you end up with a [potentially awesome] trip across the continent but a particular obscure somewhat rare flagellate you've been searching for throughout the past 5 months or so randomly decides to announce itself unexpectedly. Not only are protists sentient and exceptionally intelligent, the sly little bastards are also evil as fuck.

I do have a couple posts in the making, but don't guarantee anything until after the 20th (this includes replying to comments and emails too)...

May this round of finals be my last...! For this degree anyway...

Eight supergroups on a table

Back, after a bit of a distraction and an irritating bout of writer's block (how do you get rid of those things, seriously?). While I go write up a post for the long-interrupted Sunday Protist series, have a protisty doodle. My friends have this makeshift coffee table from two pieces of wood, which serves as a canvas for procrastination painting and such; anyway, if you supply me with permission to doodle on something, it invariably ends up protisty (or anime characters, or a frightening mix of the two), so here are eight supergroups on a table: (flash gets a a sharper image but the colours get screwed up)

Watercolour, pencil and [lab] marker on painted wood. Really fun to do watercolours on top of paint – you're not sneered at by warped wet paper, and it's very easy to wash off mistakes.

The cast:
Archaeplastida – Acetabularia
Alveolata – dinoflagellate (eg. Protoperidinium)
Stramenopila – Chaetoceros
Rhizaria – Gromia
"Hacrobia" – centrohelid "heliozoan"
Amoebozoa – tubulinid amoeba
Opisthokonta – choanoflagellate with a chitinous basket
Excavata – photosynthetic euglenid

(Accuracy not guaranteed as I was too lazy to use references)

Protist doodles

I like doodling things from time to time, especially protists. The fun aside, it's actually a nice way to acquaint oneself with how the look and behave. With protists, you get the choice of portraying the internal structures, as if viewing in transmission light microscopy, or only the surfaces, as if through SEM. Both are fun, although the former works better with ink doodles and the latter best suited for more serious shaded drawings, in my opinion. Anyway, a while ago I got home after reading and writing about Hacrobians all day, grabbed a beer and went doodling. From memory. Note that a lot of ultrastructure descriptions were read and incorporated into my work that day. Can anyone identify the organisms portrayed?

The image on the right comes from fucking around with a couple filters in ImageJ, and the result was kinda trippy. I smoothened the image, ran Find Edges on it and inverted the colours.
Oh, the image on the left was also post-processed: the original was a photo of a strip of paper with the drawings lying atop a horrible background, which was some random research paper that happened to be beneath it. The strip of paper was horribly slanted, and thus the background had to be edited out by hand, meaning I had to up the contrast until the drawing background was entirely evenly white, so I could blank out the background behind it. I really dislike post-processing besides cropping and slight change of brightness+contrast, but had little choice there. Thought I'd run this disclaimer anyway.

Post-it notes are fun to doodle on too. This is a fairly old one:

And a random trypanosome from a while ago: (the closest I'll ever get to biomedicine, ha!)

There's more, but they require being photographed or scanned, and that takes effort.

Also, I have a few posts in the making featuring protist-y things by people who can actually do art, so stay tuned. Also, if you know of some awesome protist/microbial/biology/sciencey, please do mention it here!

Ok, retreating back into my cave to work on blog posts as well as my actual writing stuff. Yay, guilt-zone!