Elemental Tales (Pg. 4 of 5)

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Pencil lineart by me bakerchemi.deviantart.com/art/…Copper is a very cute and spunky, hardworking, industrious girl.  Her Latin name is "Cuprum," and it's where her "Cu" element symbol comes from.  She's soft and malleable.  She's good friends with Gold and Silver, because she's in the same group as them in the periodic table (Group 11).  She can also alloy with Tin (I haven't drawn him yet) to make bronze, and with Zinc (I haven't drawn him yet, either) to make brass.  If she's weathered and exposed to atmospheric elements (air, seawater, etc.) over a long period of time, her body will tarnish into a greenish color.  This green substance is called verdigris (or patina), and it's usually made of copper carbonate, but it could also be copper chloride or copper(II) acetate, too.  So Copper has to shed this green skin off herself every now and then (like how a snake has to shed its skin every now and then).  Copper is highly versatile and multi-talented, useful for so many things in the world.  She's most important in the electrical industry, because she's excellent at conducting heat and electricity.  She's mostly involved in making electrical wires, roofing and plumbing, and industrial machinery.  She's also involved in making integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, and architectural material (roofs, rain gutters, downspouts, etc.), and she has antimicrobial properties (she can destroy a wide range of bacteria).  She loves jewelry, and often makes jewelry and other beauty items out of her atoms.  She's also an essential trace element that is vital to the health and nutrition of all living things.  Her favorite foods are any foods that are high in her atoms, such as oysters, beef and lamb liver, Brazil nuts, blackstrap molasses, cocoa, and black pepper.

Physical Appearance Info:
Copper's color scheme is mainly reddish-orange, because that's the color of the element copper.  Her eyes and shorts are a darker reddish-orange, to symbolize oxidized copper (copper exposed to the oxygen in the air for a long time).  Also, I decided to give her twisty ponytails, so that they'd sort of look like spools of copper wire (electrical wires are the number one application of copper today).  The thin stripes on her shirt and her shoelaces are also references to copper wires.

Element Category:  Transition metal, noble metal, precious metal, platinum group metal
Rhodium is a very smart, beautiful, and sophisticated lady.  She is part of the wealthy and elite precious metals group, and also part of the equally wealthy/elite platinum group metals.  She is Platinum's main girlfriend....the "alpha" girlfriend, if you will.   She is one of the rarest and most valuable precious metals in the world....sometimes she's even more valuable than Platinum, Gold, or Silver!  She's very confident, serious, and hard-nosed, and very resistant to corrosion and most aggressive chemicals.  She might be ladylike most of the time, but she is highly knowledgeable about automobiles, too.  The number one activity she's involved in is being one of the catalysts in the three-way catalytic converters in automobiles.  As a catalytic converter, she changes harmful unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions from the automobile's engine into less noxious gases.  She also loves jewelry.  Her atoms are electroplated on white gold and platinum jewelry to give it a reflective white surface.  Her atoms may also be used in coating sterling silver to protect against tarnish.  Her atoms are also used as an alloying agent for hardening and improving the corrosion resistance of platinum and palladium.

Physical Appearance Info:
The element rhodium is a silvery-white metal, so I put that color in Rhodium's hair and eyes.  Her clothes are darker gray tones just so they match with the lighter silvery-white tones of her eyes and hair.

Element Category:  Transition metal
Niobium is a sweet, cute, soft, and lustrous metal.  She actually has two names.  Her old name was Columbium (since the 1800s), and her old symbol was Cb.  But "Niobium" and "Nb" became her new, official name and symbol in 1949.  Most people in the world today call her Niobium....but there are still some metallurgists, metal societies, and people in the United States Geological Survey who still prefer to call her by her old name, Columbium.  She and her boyfriend Tantalum (I haven't drawn him yet) are almost always together.  They're extremely close and intimate with each other.  They're very chemically similar to each other, and are almost always found together in nature.  When it comes to activities, Niobium is mostly involved in producing high-grade structural steel, and making superalloys.  Her alloys are used in superconductors and electronic components.  She also has a hand in making mobile telephones, optical modulators, surface acoustic wave devices, and pacemakers.  She loves making colorful anodized niobium jewelry, and also teams up with Silver to make anodized silver-niobium coins (like what she's holding in her hand in the pic above).

Physical Appearance Info:
The element niobium is a grey metallic, so I put light and dark gray colors on Niobium.  The element turns blue when exposed to air for a long time, so I put some blue colors in her, too.  I designed her dress to sort of look like a strip of niobium crystals:  periodictable.com/Samples/041.… .  The ruffles and the skirt represent the outer crystal edges of the niobium strip, and the inner textured part of the dress represents the inner crystals of the strip.  There are also a few little blue crystals in the dress, since you can sometimes find a few little blue crystals in a niobium strip.

Element Category:  Noble gas
Xenon is a nice and cool guy, and interestingly enough, not nearly as shy and reserved as his other noble gas friends are.  He's actually very social, and has befriended and made compounds with many element characters, such as Fluorine, Platinum, Oxygen, and Carbon.  Xenon usually has a regular voice, but because he is one of the heaviest noble gases, he can also deepen his voice to a very deep, base voice, like heard in this example here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_768x…
Xenon is mainly involved in making xenon flash lamps (used in photographic flashes and stroboscopic lamps), xenon arc lamps, xenon HID headlamps, plasma displays, and excimer lasers.  He's a starter gas for Sodium's high pressure sodium lamps.  He can also be used as a general anesthetic.

Physical Appearance Info:
Xenon's color scheme is bluish-violet colors, because that's the color xenon produces in a gas-filled tube.

POTASSIUM
Age:  Billions of years old (but looks like a teenager on the outside)
Gender:  Female
Element Symbol:  K
Atomic Number:  19
Atomic Mass:  39.098
Element Category:  Alkali metal
Potassium is very cute, spunky, silly, and energetic.  Her Latin name is "Kalium," which is where her "K" element symbol comes from.  She's normally very cheerful, crazy, and silly.....but like with her other alkali friends, any encounters she has with water suddenly causes her to explode in great anger and violence.  She is extremely close to Sodium (since the two are very chemically similar to each other) and crushes on him.  But she doesn't mind that Chlorine officially has him....she's not the jealous type.  But she and Sodium are still very close to each other and work together on many things, such as pumping their ions in and out of animal cells (Na⁺ ions out, K⁺ ions in) through sodium-potassium pumps.  These pumps are located in the plasma membrane of all animal cells.  Potassium really loves plants, and has a major involvement in making fertilizers in agriculture, horticulture, and hydroponic culture.  She is also an important nutrient necessary for human life and health.  Her favorite foods are any foods that are high in her atoms, such as tomato paste, orange juice, beet greens, white beans, potatoes, and bananas.  She has many industrial uses, too, in the areas of industrial cleaners, gunpowder, gold mining, electroplating, nitriles, glass, soap, color TV tubes, fluorescent lamps, textile dyes, pigments, inks, dyes, stains, matches, explosives, fireworks, and much more.

Physical Appearance Info:
Potassium's color scheme is light-gray, medium-gray, and lilac (light-purple).  Potassium metal is light-gray, and when you burn the metal, it produces a lilac flame (its flame test color).

PLUTONIUM
Age:  Billions of years old (but looks like a teenager on the outside)
Gender:  Female
Element Symbol:  Pu
Atomic Number:  94
Atomic Mass:  (244)
Element Category:  Actinide
Plutonium is a very dark, moody, highly dangerous radioactive element.  She's as tough and dangerous as she is beautiful.  Since she's radioactive, she's very unstable....she has a very short fuse, and can easily explode into great anger and aggression whenever she's annoyed or provoked.  Every time her unstable self releases anger, she also releases her radioactively decaying atoms, which in turn release ionizing radiation (alpha, beta, and gamma radiation).  Anyone who has either acute or longer-term exposure to these kinds of radiation carries a danger of serious health outcomes including radiation sickness, genetic damage, cancer, and death.  Plutonium is mostly involved in nuclear activity, such as making nuclear weapons.  She's also involved in making MOX fuel (mixed oxide fuel), radioisotope thermoelectric generators, radioisotope heater units, and plutonium-powered pacemakers.

Physical Appearance Info:
Plutonium's color scheme is mostly light and dark gray, because plutonium metal is a bright silvery color, and when it's exposed to air for a long time, tarnishes to a dark-gray color.  Her orange ball earrings and the ball keychain on her skirt represent plutonium-238 oxide pellets glowing orange from their own heat.  All radioactive characters wear an armband with the trefoil radioactive symbol on it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trefoil#…
And the scar on Plutonium's cheek doesn't mean anything....I just thought it would look cool on her.


Elemental Tales (c) me.