It’s been a while, but projects are still in the works.

At the present zoom level (with final image 32k x 32k pixels) the simplistic cellular structures that I had originally made for the onion are not large enough to quite convey the complex interactions that are happening with nutrient exchange and transportation, so I think this needs to get bumped up to 64k pixels… or change the zoom level to reflect a greater zoom than is actually represented (not my preferred route).

Grouping the tiles as jpegs within folders rather than as one massive lump sum has made uploading to Box much easier: each “zoom level” has its own separate group, so if an upload is interrupted, it is much easier to see where it needs to be resumed. The largest folder takes about 12 hours to upload, exponentially decreasing the loading time as folders become smaller.

In order to get additional direct source imagery specific to the items I am working on, I am constructing a low-tech travel-sized microscope-camera based on the designs shown in this video:

He has specific instructions here here as well.

I met the designer/inventor Kenji Yoshino through a friend of mine: Molly Rideout, who runs the artist residency Grin City Collective in Grinnell, Iowa. He was a resident artist there last summer and (among many of his creative endeavors) developed this microscope with the intention of making it a resource for doing work in various settings, as well as providing alternative options for schools or programs that do not have access to higher end microscopes. Many thanks to him for posting the instructions as a resource!

I will be picking up the plexiglass today, and hopefully constructing it after work! Having the flexibility to take images of what I am seeing through the microscope will save time when rendering the more detailed aspects of these drawings. The pictures won’t be the best, most amazing quality (I only have an iPod-touch that I will use to capture photos) but their primary use is for reference material, so I don’t have to draw with one eyeball glued to the eyepiece. The university has incredible imaging cameras as well, that can take really amazing high-resolution photographs, as well as more sophisticated view-screen microscopes with various capabilities (I am quite enamored of these and would love to have one sometime in the distant future) – but for my purposes, I am okay with this for now.