Upon being told that my classmates and I  would be getting the chance to assemble the famed fold scopes we’d heard so much about in class I felt a certain amount of childlike excitement at the prospect of playing around with the something I was interested in.

(Glimpsing  the actual shapes of snow flakes up close on the car window during mid-winter drives as a kid evoked a similar feeling.)

That being said, I’d long since seen most of biology’s microscopic wonders (that I could think of and easily access) during my near constant stream of Biology courses and so despite being smack dab in the middle of Princeton’s campus I minced around quite a bit before finding something I wanted to stick under the lens caps.  But find something I did! Namely the diverse and interesting world of charcoal.

Drawing and art being my favorite hobby my desire to work with an art medium  and the foldscopes came naturally after a bit of digging about my surroundings. In fact the more I thought about it  the more genuinely curious I became about the microscopic origins of the otherwise strictly visual differences between hard, soft, and pulverized charcoal, black, red and white varieties and those that came from willow bark versus those that did not.

Now from an amateur’s artistic standpoint (estranged from the scientific analysis I was soon to jump into) I knew that  soft charcoal flowed easily off the stick in dark brassy colors, that pulverized charcoal toned entire pages in soft mid range greys and that wierdly my red and white charcoal no matter how soft it’s grade never quite flowed like black varieties.  I know that when I scribble around with it my willow charcoal imitates the grey of its pulverized counterpart, despite them not coming form the same wood source. And so again I wondered if during my short time with the foldscope I could find a microscopic basis behind these artistic differences.

After a quick and dirty transfer of the charcoal to a few slides I did find some interesting (and pretty!) results.

This picture on the bottom is hard grade black. The sharpish looking shards I saw were actually pretty surprising since I usually attribute charcoal art  with a soft and ephemeral air. Plus I use my finger to blend even the hard stuff  and never once felt resistance. Its microscopic yes but it looks pretty uncomfortable regardless! The capture on the top is black charcoal as well, but the pulverized grade that comes so light the natural air currents alone lift it up and lightly dust everything around me (for better or worse) just from opening the cap. The difference is clear interestingly enough! And I can see why the two behave so differently…

These two photos are of soft grade red and black charcoal mixed in a single slide. I wanted to see why my red charcoal never flows like the black stuff despite being the same grade and although I tried I can’t really see much difference between the two despite placing them together .

I suppose the microscopic nature of red charcoal’s stubborn flow remains an art mystery for me! But I  guess I can accept it since the way the light passed through it all still looks pretty!

This last photo is of stick black, red and white charcoal all mixed together so I could see the whole cast at once. And while the white charcoal (scattered along the bottom) gets a bit drowned out in the light I still found it extremely interesting.

So while I couldn’t quite find all the miscroscopic differences I wanted to, seeing pulverized and hard grade  charcoal side by side was quite revealing. And the different colors made for a lot of fun when I was taking photos.  Given more time I think I’d want to look at even more of my art tools if I could. Maybe some pastels?

I conducted this project as a part of Professor Pringle’s EEB 321 class at Princeton University.