Oh pixel art, how I missed you

Pixel organs

I’m designing a shirt for a post-exam adventure that my class is having after out Pathology-Immunology-Microbiology exam. I figured that since the powers that be are decided that it would be ingenious to switch to computer based exams, pixel art might be appropriate. I wish that we were printing in more than one colour, since it would be fun to colour these. I might do that anyways, just for my own fun.

PS I’m watching the Oscars. I hope Up wins everything.

Wilco!

I saw Wilco last night. The show was amazing! Mike and I also got a poster, we shall add this to our (growing) collection of screen printed posters. I’ll take a photo of them sometime. Wilco always has amazing, amazing posters. Check them out!

Bahamas opened, and he (plus drummer) was excellent too. Listen! (courtesy  of CBC3)

Letterpressed Heart

letterpressed heart by Etsy seller Rollandtumblepress

I might be hard to resist getting this, since it’s both letterpress and anatomical. Not to mention just plain cute. This creation is by Etsy seller Roll & Tumble Press.

Humanities Days

Humanities Days

This is the first poster I’ve done in a while (or at least it feels like it). The people on the Humanities Committee love bright, primary colours, so that’s what I went for.

Finished journal

Undergraduate Journal, layout and design

Way back when (and I do mean forever ago) I told the very newly envisioned undergraduate science journal that I would help them with their graphic and layout design. More than a year later the first issue is out and even though it was a lot of stress at crunch time everything turned out so well and there were no issues with the printer or printing at all. I’m incredibly proud of this little thing, despite the years it seemed to take off my life.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I’m so very excited for this movie. Not only is it a book that I loved when I was a kid (I read almost all of Roald Dalh’s books), but it’s Wes Anderson and IT’S CLAYMATION!

I have a super soft spot in my heart for claymation ever since I made a couple of my own back in the day. I think that they were so smart to do this movie in this medium instead of computer animation. Don’t get me wrong, I love that style too, but this is just too perfect.

Arteries and veins of the upper limb

Arteries and veins quiz (Illustrator)

This week is upper limb week in school. As part of my homework, I had to teach the arteries and veins of the upper limb (arm and hand) to the rest of the group. One of the girls starting doing nice fill-in-the-blanks type questions and it works so well. So I decided that why ruin a good thing? Of course I spent more time drawing the picture and making it pretty than actually studying the vessels, but at least I was looking at them. Right? Right?

And of course, the answers:

Arteries and veins (with answers)

The lonely mouse

Group-housed mice (Illustrator)

School has been busy to say the least. Fun and interesting, but busy. I did get all of the revisions on my paper done though, and it’s been resubmitted and accepted (WOOT!). Now it’s on to the poster. I decided that I should make my poster extra pretty, since it’s going to the huge neuro conference that’s happening in Chicago in a couple weeks. The only thing better would be if I was actually going with it. So in an effort to snazzify my poster (which would otherwise just be a bunch of graphs, such is life for a behavioural researcher, people who do histology get to actually have photos), I decided that some vector art might do the trick. So I whipped up these puppies mice. There’s actually another mouse that goes with them, since the study was investigating housing. So these are the group-housed ones and on the other side of the poster I’ll have the lonely mouse who is all alone. Poor mousey. I bet we all have days like that, I suppose we should just be happy that someone didn’t permanently move us to individual housing.

I’ll post a copy of the poster when it’s done. Which feels like never right now.

Seal (name chop)

Chinese seals, Left: mine, Right: Mike's

For quite a while I’ve wanted a seal, the name kind, not the mammalian kind. So when my birthday came around this year, I figured that it would be a cool thing to ask for. Of course, being on the east coast of Canada, it’s not like there’s a seal carver on every street corner. Or any street corner for that matter. So the internet search began. There are a lot of internet sites that will provide this service, so it was hard trying to find one that was legit and also well thought out. I didn’t just want my name in some generic font on the bottom of a rock. Luckily in my search I came across Chinese 4 Arts.

The thing that really caught my attention with this site is the artist who runs it, Chengwei Fang, is actually a scientist by day, artist by night, which of course I can relate to. Plus his gallery was really good. Mike and I decided that we might as well both get one and since it was my birthday gift, he did all of the communications with Chengwei. The whole process was really personal and really fast and the results are awesome! We just got them in the mail this week and I’m so so pleased with how they turned out. Mine’s the red on white, while Mike’s the white on red. I can’t recommend Chengwei enough, he was amazing to work with and produced two unique and beautiful seals.

Run heart run

Pacemakers heart

So a couple people in my class started a running club. It’s pretty darn awesome. A bunch of us are going to attempt a half marathon this coming month, and we decided that it would be awesome if we had matching shirts. One of the best parts about medical school is that puns are strongly encouraged. Thus the group is named “The Pacemakers”. Get it? Get it? We’re cool like that. It was then decided that we needed an incredibly silly logo so I created this guy. There’s nothing better than a heart on a pacemaker happily running along.

It’s also almost entirely anatomically correct (of course).