Artistic Intent
The biggest thing I wanted to show was the contrast of the color of the microbes against the hue of the plates’ background. I wanted the background to enhance the image in a way and put it front and center. Two of my plates have decently turned out.
For Angry Microbe, I wanted to vividly show the bacteria’s colors, and I decided to choose the TSA plate as the background since it seemed like the best fit. The reds and the yellow popped out nicely, manifesting the anger in the expression very well. If I had picked the EMB or the MAC agar plates, the colors wouldn’t have stood out as well as it did on the TSA, and the face wouldn’t look as clear as I would have liked.
Bact(eria) In Black is a tribute to one of my favorite rock bands, and for this piece I wanted a darker theme. I chose the MacConkey agar plate for this reason, and surprisingly, the result was very satisfactory, despite the fact that the lightning bolt in the middle didn’t turn out as I had hoped. It was supposedly a yellowish lightning bolt that divides the two sets of letters. Other than that, the background sort of enhanced the theme I was looking for, and the dark letters were big and loud and prominent… just like AC/DC.