Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.
This day is a patchwork of highlights. I don’t know if there is any one place that this could really happen, but ‘ideal’ has to be able to include the impossible.
Mrs S is with me throughout, the kids join us for lunch then do their own thing after dinner.
Wake up about seven, in a big hotel room with a massive en suite.
Full English breakfast – local butcher’s sausages, back bacon, two fried eggs, black pudding, fried potatoes, toast, coffee. Or steak and potatoes if FEB isn’t available.
Walking tour including local architecture, industrial, religious and civic. A lot of pointing at ceilings and mulling over the fact that we’re lucky we don’t have to work in those conditions at the mill/ mine/ factory/ farm that is now a working museum.
Lunch is fish and chips by the sea, where the kids have joined us after a morning shopping. There is a magic seagull exclusion zone so we can eat them undisturbed and the chippy has saveloy for Mrs S.
Afternoon at a bookshop where you can get lost among the shelves, the type Terry Pratchett described as ‘a genteel black hole that can read’. Someone magically comes and takes our books and other purchases back to the hotel for us.
Coffee and cake (fruit cake or tiffin) to tide us over.
Evening session at an observatory or other science museum where we will again do a lot of pointing at stuff and talk about science and the like.
Late dinner. Italian restaurant overlooking a scorched valley in Tuscany, the evening has cooled enough that we can eat comfortably, but a cold Peroni or three is welcome. I’m not driving, so what the hell. A selection of charcuterie to start, then something involving gnocchi, a spicy pizza and gelato for dessert.
After dinner, stand up comedy at an upstairs cellar with acts I’ve never seen before but leaving me exhausted with laughter. The fortifying pint of Guinness at the interval will see me through.
A couple of whiskies as a nightcap. Something floral for preference, a Speyside single malt or a selection of whiskies from around the world.
A slight departure, this time I’ve designed a mug. I was thinking about what molecules would look good on a coffee mug and the obvious answer was ‘caffeine’.
One of the things I had planned to use Blender for was to make scientific models and diagrams as well as protein and molecular models. How to do these things was another matter and how to make anything of them when the market for scientific diagrams is (a) small and (b) a closed shop were further matters.
Having had the idea of caffeine-on-a-mug1 I hit the University of YouTube and found out how to get from a molecule to a 3D design, and then from a 3D design to a cartoonised version. This latter was a design choice – I thought it would look bold and also it would be a way of cutting down on the number of colours required for the design.
I found a good tutorial by CG Figures who went through the two-step process to get from molecule name to a file that can be read by Blender.
I was already familiar with one of the websites that was recommended – molview.org – and the software to convert the SMILES file into a protein database (.pdb) file was easy enough to use. The SMILES format is a standardised way of representing organic molecules and it was the format I used to input molecules of interest into a molecular modelling tool to predict the pharmacokinetics of drugs – SwissADME is the website, if you’re interested.
Once I’d got the molecule model into Blender, there were a bunch of further steps to clean up the file into something that didn’t take up too much filespace and have extraneous faces that could give odd results when the image is finally rendered.
The caffeine molecule after some tweaking of the initial file. The software adds colours by default, in this case grey is carbon, blue is nitrogen, red is oxygen and white is hydrogen.
It didn’t take long to get to the point where I had a model that I could use as a basis for a design. Next, I wanted to turn it into a cartoon version. This means that the light and shade are demarcated by sharp lines with no fading.
In Blender there is a function called a “color ramp” which takes a colour or a shade and changes it. Using this I could control which parts of the atoms were darker and which had highlights. By moving the light around I could change where the light spots landed and also change the size of the highlights. And because the software sees the molecular model as a three dimensional object, the highlights vary around the model, making the model look more three dimensional, even though the idea is to create a two dimensional image.
Three cartoon monkey heads. Turning the head changes the cartoon lighting and adding grease pencil adds definition to the image.
In order to add a more cartoony look, a function called grease pencil can be used to add black lines to the scene. There are two ways to do this. Blender can add grease pencil automatically, which is what I’ve done here. You can also add it manually so that you can put details on the image.
Anyway, back to the caffeine image. Not only did I add the cartoon effect and grease pencil, but the molecule needed a caption so we know what it is.
Alternative fonts for the caption. I like the Bauhaus font (left) as a design choice, but the capital C is a bit too closed to read easily. Berlin font (right) has a similar vibe and a more open C.
Looking through font choices I tried Bauhaus – it’s bold and has a historic feel to it. After showing this to Mrs S, I changed to Berlin. She pointed out that the C in the Bauhaus font is a bit too closed, and the Berlin version looks better in this application.
As an alternative, there’s also the molecule on a mustard-coloured background and in German. I’ve yet to offer these alternatives in the shop, I don’t know how big the German market for nerdy science mugs is2. I will likely keep the Bauhaus font for this, since the K looks echt cool, oder? I’ll need to use either Berlin or another font for the French (caféine), Spanish and Portuguese (cafeína) and Italian (caffeina) versions.
Two view of caffeine (Bauhaus font) and Koffein. Mustard yellow background or pinky purple? Which is better?
I can try other background colours, but I’m not sure what works best. Any suggestions are welcome.
The finished design could then be uploaded to Gelato so I could put that onto a mug and then get it published on Etsy.
Mock-up of the finished mug nestled in a bed of curly brown stuff.
Grim up North Heath 