Cover-art lottery

The editorial office for Adv. Mater contacted me recently, asking if I wanted to submit a possible cover art featuring my paper. It didn't take long to convince me to give it a try. After all, how hard can it be?

My good friend and colleague Kazem (check out his website here) recommended Blendr for the most professional-looking polish to the art work. So at the weekends I packed my lunches and set myself to a solid weekend of learning how to render things in Blendr. It was quite a struggle for a complete amateur like myself, whose expertise was mostly limited to Fiji and CorelDraw.

Anyway after 4 days of struggle, I have finally pieced together a piece of 'artwork' that I feel adequately featured the trapping of core-shell particles using a laser beam inside a dense 3D colloidal material. Parts of it may not be scientifically perfect or technically accurate (ahem. laser beam), but ultimately we could put that down to artistic licence maybe?

Sadly the editorial team disagreed with my views on this, and my attempt was not picked as the cover this time. Needless to say, I am still very proud of my efforts, and of myself for trying something completely out of my comfort zone. Better luck next time!