My name is Dave Goodsell.
and I work here at the Scripps Research Institute.
I'm doing research and I also work with the RCSB Protein Data Bank,
and there I'm doing science outreach.
I started painting 100 years ago, when I was a small child.
My grandfather bought me my first watercolour set
and he did beautiful, beautiful stuff,
classic watercolours – barns and trees.
But then I started applying it to my science
and it was a really lucky time for that
where we were starting to solve a bunch of structures
and we needed this kind of visual approach to help us understand what we were doing.
I'm trying to capture a scientifically accurate picture of a cell.
Like if we took a piece of it, blew it up, what would we see? That's my goal.
But I'm also really happy that a lot of people see it as art.
I think they give a nice intuitive feel
for how crowded cells are and the complexity of cells.
These cellular scenes that I'm depicting are very complicated,
so I wanted to come up with a style that's simple enough
that you can see the whole picture without getting caught up in the details.
That's why I use flat colours, simple outlines and kind of cartoony stuff.
Along with that, I needed a style that was simple enough and quick enough
that I could get them done in a reasonable amount of time – without going crazy.
The first step is to make sure that the science is all correct.
That is like a big treasure hunt.
I'm going to the literature and trying to dig up as much information as I can find.
Once I have all the information in place,
the first step is to create a full sketch of what I want to do.
And so I make liberal use of the eraser, to make sure that everything is all connected
and interacting in the way that I want it to.
Then after all that complex tangled stuff is put together,
I start to dot in the things that are more localised
in the spaces that are left over.
Since cells are mostly colourless, we can do any colour we want.
So I've chosen a colourful palette
that's designed to highlight the different compartments of the cell,
to show that the nucleus is here, the cytoplasm is here
and the membrane is here.
I do try to make the outlines more subtle, or no outline,
in places where things are interacting with each other.
I also play games with little gesture lines here and there,
just to try to bring a little more depth, a little more life into the pictures.
But for the most part, they're pretty simple.
The Molecule Of The Month at the RCSB Protein Data Bank
is one of the great joys of my life right now.
What I hope to do is to make everything more accessible to students,
to make it easier for them to make the step into the archive
and start learning about science themselves.
I created the Ebola painting to capture this moment of time
when Ebola was a big scare.
I wanted to capture some of the science behind Ebola,
make it a little more familiar
and let people know that we're really actively working on ways to fight this virus.
I chose the painting to submit to the contest
just because it has that direct scientific application
and utility to a bunch of different groups of people.
I'm also happy with how it turned out.
The symmetry of the whole thing makes it kind of an attractive painting.
I was really happy to hear that the judges had chosen my painting for the prize.
The Wellcome Images initiative is a really amazing resource for our community.
I'm very happy to be part of it.