Goodsell has developed a signature style of scientific drawing. He started painting early in his childhood but did not study art in college. In graduate school, Goodsell became interested in scientific illustration while writing molecular graphics programs to visualize protein and DNA structures. Goodsell's signature style uses generally very flat shading, with strong and simple colour-schemes. As is typical in medical illustration, the images are simplified representations of the subject that still retain accuracy of the important features. His illustrations fall broadly into two categories: individual proteins, and cellular panoramas. His images of individual proteins are typically computer generated, cell-shaded space-filling representations of proteins, often with cut-aways to show internal binding sites and cofactors. Conversely, his illustration of cell interiors are hand-painted in watercolours. They are typically slices through a cell with highly simplified protein structures in a flat style in order to capture overall organisation without overwhelming detail. These cell interiors are often displayed at an effective 1,000,000x magnification for consistency. The paintings therefore share a consistent style, aiming to make interpretation easy and as intuitive as possible. His illustrations are published in the "Molecule of the Month" series by the Protein Data Bank, an archive of protein structures. His illustrations are used as teaching tools, in textbooks, in scientific publications, and as journal cover art.
Process
For individual proteins, Goodsell's illustrations are directly generated from solved protein structures deposited in the PDB using custom computer renderings that he wrote in Fortran. Representations of large macromolecular complexes or crowded cellular environments require interpretation and synthesis of multiple different types of scientific imaging. These include X-ray crystallography and NMR for protein components, cryo electron tomography for larger complexes, and super-res light microscopy and electron microscopy for the cellular environment. In these cases, the focus in on portraying the relative scales, orientations and interactions between the components. In order to portray an accurate degree of crowding background gaps are filled with approximate sized generic proteins so that artistic license used to increase the accuracy of the overall representation.
