I have processed and printed a few protein structures, exploring shading using a pen plotter. The process is described further down.
The prints are printed using an AxiDraw pen plotter with Pigma Micron Fineliner pens on 297 x 210 mm (A4), 220 g/m2 acid free paper from Daler Rowney. They are printed in 10 numbered copies each.
The print titles are listed left to right.
| Title | Prints still available for purchase |
|---|---|
| Serotonin receptor | 6 of 10 |
| Green fluorescent protein | 6 of 10 |
| SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein | 6 of 10 |
| Immunoglobulin G monoclonal antibody | 6 of 10 |
The process
The protein structure data from the Protein Data Bank has been processed in PyMOL, exported to Blender 3D for rendering and finally made into a shaded vector based line drawing in Inkscape with the text added. The whole idea was to explore the use of hatching techniques to shade 3D renderings of the proteins. Turning the results into physical prints using an AxiDraw pen plotter soon became too tempting to resist. For the larger proteins I decided to render the surface rather than the schematic structure.
