There might be three people among my active followers who still remember when this blog was primarily about hard science and tech – without artistic adornments.
These were the glory days of the internet, in the early 2010s. When social media had not yet defeated small blogs. We had our German heat pump and energy blog – mistaken for a personal fun site by many, recognized as the subtle commercial blog that is was by some astute heat pump aficionados :)
Some of that spilled over to my blog here. While blogging about cyber security, life, the universe and everything, and publishing experimental poetry, I also wrote more than 80 articles on the heat pump system we’ve developed, solar energy, and monitoring/hacking related data and devices.
It started with a veiled, feeble confession in early 2013:
We were weaving together our origin story with the history of the local village architecture (“Streckhof”):
Challenged to create a “video” of the “states” of the heat pump system, we rather provided a series of one image per month – this became my standard link when somebody asked how it worked:
At that time, the Chief Engineer was the only illustrator in he family. You will recognize his subtle consistent style in all the plots and hydraulic schemata. We even found a way of connecting his unique iconography of pipe connections to theoretical physics and public key infrastructure at the same time:
Even the word “Art” creeped in a title once – in a blog post about a client’s system – long before I knew I was interested in or capable of creating art:
I have been the Science Officer, supporting the Chief Engineer with software development for data analysis, numerical simulations, and tools for systems sizing. (But we had no captain.)
We reported in our current data every few months, and it felt like handing in another thesis every time. (I was also a moonlighting “non-traditional” student of renewable energy engineering at that time which was very uncommon for somebody with a PhD in physics.)
Accidentally I found out that our “official PDF” had also been cited in a serious scientific publication.
I did not have strong opinions on this blog for a long time. There are too many people with strong opinions on the internet already. But I would have had much sarcastic to say about people who make a business out of governmentally funded renewable energy projects. We have been proud of funding all our very detailed research and prototyping ourselves.
But then I heard somebody say exactly what I believed, and under the guise of writing about the history of science and engineering I quoted his words with glee:
I have tried science and tech writing at all levels – end-user friendly, funny, with poetry, super nerdy. Possibly I was scaring off people subscribing for the the heat pump content:
This one might have hit a sweet spot: Giving a summary for the energy enthusiast first, and adding a large appendix with the equations after.
This plot taken from that blog post was my current inspiration – the (calculated) temperature beneath the surface of the earth, in the four seasons (at the Northern hemisphere).
Solar energy stored in summer can be used by heat pump in winter. This is often (mis-)named geothermal energy. The true geothermal energy accounts for the weird tilt of the tail of this plot, and it stems from radioactive decay and the “primordial heat” (when stuff came together to form planet earth, driven by gravity).
I wanted a simplified, vintage-looking watercolor version of this: Faded, less precise, slightly enigmatic. I considered drawing the position of the earth on its elliptical path round the sun to signify the seasons. Then I rememberd that the Aries symbols was used to indicate vernal equinox in astronomy illustrations:
The painting is shiny as I sealed it with spray varnish – as this has been a test for mounting watercolor paper on stretched canvas!
I wanted to combine the advantages of drawing and painting on watercolor paper with the upsides of using a lightweight yet sturdy canvas frame.
I was slightly scared when trimming and cropping the paper to the exact size, but this went better than I expected:
I might have found my perfect drawing surface.
Of course, it also has to work for printed (digital, code-generated) art. I have tried that, too, but this post is already too long! So, I am leaving a cliff-hanger here – stay tuned!
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