Now that school is finished I have begun, again, to do more projects for my current employer Deseret News. What you see below is the result of several weeks of graphics and research work. I give much thanks to
antark.net for most of the research material. The site is fairly simple but full of all kinds of great info on ants.
The process
I chose to take advantage of my limited skills in Blender 2.7 to create the ant illustration. I sifted through hundreds of ant images. Amazing how many shapes, sizes and colors ants come in. I chose to go with a sort of generic worker ant. I can't get over what a pleasure it is to work in Blender. By far it is the most dynamic and evolved of all the open source programs available. Blows my mind that it is FREE.
The two graphics on the right were created in Adobe Illustrator. I painstakingly outlined from raster images to get what you see here. Originally I wanted to use my 3D ant to help illustrate the innards of the ant. But as the deadline drew near I realized this was
far too ambitious, and perhaps too difficult to effectively illustrate in print. I saw that unless I wanted to render multiple images showing different angle s of the ant, it wouldn't be possible. As print space is extremely limited this was not an option either. So I went with a 2D diagram.
The rest of the text and a few other illustrative elements were laid out in InDesign to create the final page. Also used was a single shutterstock image in the lower left corner. I have received quite a few positive responses to this News in Education page.
Morality of an ant habitat
Something that crossed my mind as I worked on the ant colony section (lower left corner) concerned the morality of a child having their own ant colony. I had multiple colonies over the course of my childhood. The thought never occurred to me that I had condemned between 20 and 30 ants to death by trapping them in an enclosed space. As I have grown older my respect for God's creations has grown. My appreciation for the complexity of life, put into motion by my maker, has deepened immensely. Is allowing a child to have an ant colony for their own personal enjoyment good? For me I don't have a problem with this. An ant looks on me in a way that is no different than it would any other challenge in its life. A flood, or some kid stomping out the colony are viewed with little difference in the mind of an ant. Morality is only to be found in the soul of the person looking upon the ant. As a parent am I morally obligated to defend those ants my child is condemning to death? In this case I believe not. Ants in my backyard are considered pests, and my child plucking less than 100 of them from the earth will make very little difference on the colony. The reality of ants in general is that they have possibly been around for millions upon millions of years. They will probably be around long after humans have expired from this planet. Bottom line is that it is OK, morally, in my view, for my child to have an ant colony. Also gives them an opportunity at a glimpse into the workings of one of God's amazing creations.
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