MIcroscopic Drawing ... For the Win!

As we learned from the previous entry on the Harmonocle, sometimes it's necessary to have a precision eyepiece on hand. So why not make a few drawings while you're at it? And if you're going to go that far, why not make some drawings with a microscope?



Well, Old Ken had previously done some such of insects. I'm not sure of the name of the little critter you see depicted here, but the larger insects I tried to draw (flies, spiders, and so on) were a little too complicated for me.



So, I decided to study a segment of the stem of a grape. In my copy of O.W. Richards "The Effective Use and Proper Care of the Microscope" (1941), I read about what is called a "reticule" (or grid) that can be inserted into the microscope's eyepiece. With this in place in, you see the target object through the grid. While I didn't have access to said reticule, I found that gridding off the paper made the drawing quite a bit easier -- for guessing distances between features, judging comparative sizes, etc.



With the bug above, I had photographed the drawing, imported it into Photoshop, and then digitally whited out the background, while messing around with the colors to make it look more "professional." In this stem drawing, though, I wanted to leave in a bit more evidence of the drawing process. So, while I had started to erase some of the grid around the figure, I decided to leave it in so that the construction of the image would be clearer.



The difficulty with doing this kind of drawing is trying to reconcile all of the different focal lengths of the observed objects into one coherent graphic picture. The little knobs in the detail above, for example, project outward from the surface of the stem such that you cannot see them in focus - - even with the weak magnification that I was using - - at the same time as pilaster-like background field. The more extreme difficulties presented by this are evident in the incomplete "elephant's foot" shape in the lower right of the drawing - - a region of the stem that had been broken off from the larger grape branch. Part of the reason for the incompleteness here was that I wasn't sure how to reconcile the signficant projections from the cylindrical stem form together into a coherent image. Well, anyway, not so successful as drawings, but still fun!