My name is Patricia Elenie, and these are my stories.

I’m happy with the response from the wedding photos, particularly glad that Matt and Talat liked them (p.s., I’ll be mailing you two some actual prints). 

Moving onto non-wedding things. 

Last week I got the chance to work on a pretty cool graphic for the Phoenix community paper. The reporter wanted an infographic to show how a new exhibition at the Arizona Science Center worked. It’s something called the SkyCycle: pretty much a bike on a high-wire cable, suspended over the first floor.  Ever the investigative journalist, I popped in to check it out and do some ‘research’. 

Not sure if you can tell there, but the bike is not harnessed to anything. The rider is harnessed to the back of the bike, and that line you see there at the bottom is just so if someone freaks out, the staff can pull them back. Obviously there are all these physics aspects about how/why the bike doesn’t flip over, and I had to understand those in order to then turn around and explain that in a simplified way. So I talked to a few people there, took notes, slept on it, and hopefully I was successful in at least conveying the basics to our readers. 

I did everything in Illustrator, using another photo as reference, and a lot of people around the newsroom seemed to like it. 

When I get to do stuff like this, I realize that my job doesn’t always suck, and sometimes I forget to mention that because, yes, there’s a lot of crap that goes on (case in point: the upcoming layoffs were officially announced today). I suppose with the impending and very real possibility of losing my job, it’s easier to see the things I’d be missing out on.