As a rule in scientific education, at some point between starting undergraduate and doing professional research it would seem we are expected to simply start knowing how to do things, without necessarily any formal training. One example in my degree was writing code, but another, as it turns out, is drawing figures for papers. Today, I would like to assist with the latter!

Inkscape https://inkscape.org/ is free and very powerful. Paired with python plotting and the textext plugin https://github.com/textext/textext it can really handle a lot, from abstract concepts to technical diagrams to artistic illustrations. Here I’ll just describe the workflow for including LaTeX and plots generated in Matplotlib, the rest (the artsy bit) is more about playing around with the different tools to find an ideal workflow.