This is how I made a multi-panel figure about leafminers. I found my specimen at the Franklin Permaculture Garden in the corner of the garden. I found my specimen specifically in a bush with long leaves at the corner of the garden.
I used my phone to take a couple pictures, the first one being the main plant with the affected area being visible, and a second one where I had a close up shot of the affected leaf with an object held right next to it for size comparison. I ended up taking six picture from which I only used two. I first tried the close up picture by holding my phone in one hand and using my other hand to lightly pull the leaf making sure the affected area was as visible as possible. I then tried taking a picture of the main plant but I only took one step back from the plant so the picture didn’t show much. I took another two steps back and took another picture which is the one I ended up using for the figure. A classmate was kind enough to lend me a mechanical pencil to use as the object for size comparison, so I took another close up photo where my hand held both the mechanical pencil and the leaf while making sure the pencil was close to the leaf and it was near the affected area.
I used the program Inkscape to make my multi-panel figure. I imported the first picture ( the main plant with the visible affected area) and locked it to keep the scale. I then shrank it down and aligned its top left corner to the left corner of what will eventually be the multi-figure panel. Next, I used a drawing tool to draw an arrow to point to the affected area, and I paint it yellow since it was hard to see if it was a black arrow. The next picture ( the close up shot on the leaf with an object for size comparison) followed a similar process but this time the top right corner of the picture will be aligned to the top right corner of the multi-panel figure. *Only do this if the two pictures are different sizes* Unfortunately, my two pictures where different sizes and to fix that I increased the overall size of the second picture until the height aligned itself with the height of the first one. However, this caused the second picture to overlap over the first one. In order to fix this I brought the first picture up a layer so that it would overlap the second picture instead. Finally, I used a website to download a picture of the area on campus where I found my subject and I imported it to Inkscape. I repeated what I did with the previous pictures and fit the map into the bottom of the multi-panel figure aligning the top edge of the map picture to the bottom edge of the two other pictures. As final touches, I used the same drawing tool as before to make an X to mark roughly where I found my specimen; I also added the letters A, B, and C to boxes which I placed at the top left corner of each picture in the added order.
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