So… I’m cheating a bit here. I began this image in homage to Carbon Based Lifeforms, a Swedish ambient music band that is one of my favorites to listen to while sketching. Their music is mostly instrumental with wordless vocals, but lyrics do come in from time to time, such as these:

“Only illogics can find
Hidden flaws in a straight logic line.
Only erratics recognize
Errors in patterns of a perfect design.”

These particular lifeforms were of course heavily influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel, with the central structure inspired by an allotrope of carbon popularly known as the Buckyball.

Unfortunately, some very erratic household chaos kept me away from the computer last week, so I missed my chance to chime in with the “C”s for AlphaBands. But as it happened, my choice for “D” was the bizarre alter ego of Kool Keith known as Dr. Octagon. Though his music could hardly be more different from CBL, (and, I should warn, it is mostly extremely NSFW) some of his color-crazed & hallucinatory lyrics somehow wormed their way into the picture:

“I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope 
Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep beep
Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap
Look at the land…blue flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, in the purple pastures blue flowers!
Drawing by the purple pond, yellow ink that flows blue flowers!
Drawing by the pond, look, it’s raining yellow” 

So, consider this the visual equivalent of a mashup. It’s just a pity that Buckyballs are constructed from hexagons & pentagons, with nary an octagon in the picture.

Photoshop with text scanned from Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry, 1876