The year is 2019. I’ve recently become a fully fledged adult (postdoctoral researcher) capable of earning a self-sustaining wage, paying taxes and contributing to society. So what’s the first thing I do? Try and keep my income underneath my tax bracket, so I don’t incur that extra 1% tax in medicare levi surcharges. Daylight robbery. The solution? Buy a brand new laptop with all the extras, new phone, and university car parking on salary sacrifice. Ingenius. I acquired a spanking brand new Surface Pro 7 with the highest specs, matching red surface pen and keyboard. Then COVID-19 hits, university parking fees get refunded and I pay the full medicare surcharge…

Edit: Hi, it’s 2023, the pandemic is over – Just wanted to say: Don’t buy the Surface Pro. They don’t keep their value. I can’t even sell it for $500 now, that’s less than 25% of what I paid 4 years ago.

A few interesting things did happen between that time. As the 30-50% workplace capacity was introduced, whilst we obtained our special access COVID-19 working permits, the laboratory was split into an early morning shift (7am to 3pm) and a late afternoon shift (3pm to 11pm) . For communication within the lab, we left notes detailing simple tasks for each other if we wanted our experiments to be progressed as the lab was now manned 16 hours a day. Research Assistant Dhil left a note to Research Assistant Hanim’s bench. I intercepted this note and thought it would be hilarious to draw Hanim’s face on the note. What would RA Hanim think? That RA Dhil randomly decided to draw her?

I grabbed a pen and began doodling his face.

This was the result …

To my surprise, the very next day. No one said anything.
So I intercepted another note and drew another face.
This time, one of Dhil, with some

The day after, when questioned if I were the one drawing faces, I burst out laughing, unable to contain my laughter. Soon, lab members were leaving notes everywhere and I gladly obliged their request of having their faces drawn. And of course, I drew them all!

Then, in 2020, when the worst lockdowns in Victoria arrived and we were all confined to our own home-made prisons, with strict curfews detailing how many hours we were allowed outside, I embarked on a long goal. To draw the face of everyone in the lab. For those few 3-4 months, my life was consumed with trying to capture the likeness of each of my lab’s members, on top of my postdoctoral duties. It wasn’t always easy, some of the students that I had not known for that long were probably the more difficult faces to draw. I think sometimes, it’s knowing their personality and expression that makes it easier to draw them? Is that a thing? So for some of them, I just cheated. I found a photo of them on Facebook and just sketched it out. I’m still not proud of this…

Eleven lab members, eleven faces. Now that I had gotten all the faces done, how was I to arrange it? I tried setting up a canvas like this, but it was so gross. After seeing how hideous this was, I knew it wasn’t going to work. Just having heads floating around a page just wasn’t going to cut it. I had to draw the bodies, or at least some of the bodies. After this realization, I breathed out a sigh and kept on drawing. I set myself a timeline as well. I would give this to Steph as a Christmas present in 2020.

So I went ahead and drew the bodies of everyone as well. I always knew about layering, but I hadn’t used hundred of layers before. Trying to organise everything was chaotic, especially when I coloured each person in individually. Having coloured everyone’s skin tone a different shade of white, pink and brown, I realised how natually multi-cultured we all were. And thought about it for a second… there was this quote… something, something, torch. This got my juices flowing, and I decided we all needed to be below the torcher bearer, cascading out like a Christmas tree.

All of the sketches were drawn in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and then I imported them to Krita, hilariously, I didn’t know how to remove the background from Sketchbook to get transparent images of everyones faces, so I spent a lot of time erasing the poorly rendered white background. It was a nightmare. Months later whilst watching some drawing and colouring videos on youtube, I noticed that the vtuber hit a hotkey which flipped the drawing across the vertical access to get a mirror image. He explained that althought it might look right to us in one way, flipping it over can help you correct any asymmetry and weirdness in the drawings…

Of course, I printed the completed copy for Steph for her Christmas present in 2020. But I’ve always wanted a mirrored print out for mysef to hang up somewhere.