Visualizing the Biological

I thought I’d show my working process in photoshop, starting with drawing and going toward finished illustration!

This portrays the pulling/dissecting up of the gallbaldder from the liver bed.  It’s actually kind of a bloody mess; it’s not like the gallbladder just sits and hangs out by the liver, it becomes tightly invested in it via connective tissue and small vessels.

The checked background is the default background in photoshop, letting you know what’s transparent and what’s not.  I’d probably leave that out next time.

The original drawing, scanned and masked

Initial masking and tonal development

More finessing of tonal base and vignetting

even more tonal finessing

Rough color study - see the blood?

Refined color choices and flat masking

The final - more vignetting, adjustment of tone, and more color variation, and highlights.

It needed to be clear that it’s not the prettiest thing to happen in the body, but didn’t want to get gory.  The final looks rather watercolorish in some respects.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Male left ear, graphite.  Well, to be precise it’s just the auricle.  The middle and inner ear can’t be seen.

Thanks, Chris Davis.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I have yet to really do that gratuitous eye drawing that every artist at sometime does – so with a little more freetime, I took it up!  Here’s the resulting sketch, from a mirror, in charcoal:

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Here’s a good idea: define and exaggerate the visual dynamics of your drawings and sketches, farther than you initially believe they need to be. An analogy to music performance is the need to always push acoustic dynamics further.

Even if they’re rough sketches, the client needs to be able to read the illustration and have a good sense for the aesthetic subtleties you’ll be using. You also may never know what their eyesight is like – just because it looks good to you doesn’t mean it’s getting the point across to someone else. How do you know when you’ve pushed contrast and tonality enough? A nice trick is to walk 20 feet away from your drawing. If contrast, lineweight, and dynamics are right, the main content, if not all details, should still be very visible. Simple but trustworthy.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Happy Valentine’s Day -  we have in the department an incredibly accurate heart model – it’s based on a wax mold from the real thing.  Here are some quick-ish sketches.

Laeral heart model sketch

Posterior heart model drawing

Internal heart model drawing

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

For any classical guitarists out there, this has nothing to do with fingernails.

During my undergrad education, every graphic design project began with 20 or so thumbnail comps.  While they sometimes got taxing, it was a great way to play around with basic layouts, ideas, eliminate what didn’t work, and most importantly, establish new and better ideas I hadn’t originally thought of.

In projects that are really improvisatory, thumbnails aren’t as important.  But the nature of medical illustration isn’t so much that way – ‘user-friendly’ is the name of the game.   So in medical illustrations, it’s even more important to work out what does and doesn’t work before you get very far into a finished sketch.  I always find it tempting to get started in some juicy details once I get an idea I’m excited about – and this is probably why I haven’t been doing thumbnails as much as I should.  But from experience, it’s always better to work from big to little – establish all the important things first, and only then go in and have fun with textures, smudging, etc.  The more time you take to establish a good rough draft, the less production time and backtracking there is. Thus, thumbnails give you an arena to find out what doesn’t work early on, so in the end you get a solid piece that communicates the story very well.

thumbnail examples from undergrad days - none of these made it to the final

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Below are both the original sketch and a color study for a recent project illustrating some Metzenbaum scissors spreading apart a bit of intestinal mesentery.  The render was done from observation during pig surgery, memory, and photos.  The final is in 3 variations – line, tone, and color, all done in only traditional media.  It was surprisingly refreshing to get away from Photoshop completely for a project, especially when digging into some watercolor work and figuring out the palette for the highly vascular tissue.

Finals to be posted later.

Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: preliminary sketch

Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: color study

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

A sketch of a sac of oranges.  Charcoal pencil again on pastel paper.

Technique’s a little rough, but it is a sketch after all – and the lighting and sense of form turned out believable.

The netting was good practice for any gauze I do in surgical illustrations.  Speaking of, we learned how to scrub our hands in prep for surgery today – my skin got some good exfoliating because of it.

Sac of Oranges

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

A sketch of broccoli, charcoal pencil on pastel paper.

A great food, broccoli is a source of protein, fiber, potassium, vitamin C, and even beta-carotene, better known as the carrot nutrient that aids in healthy eye function, but has also shown to be anti-cancer.

It also contains significant amounts of isothiocyanates and indole-3-carbinol, both of which research has shown to battle or prevent certain cancers.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I took some time tonight to do an acrylic sketch of an orange- I love still lifes that you can eat afterwards. Besides being full of vitamin C, a powerful antioxidant, this fruit has cancer-fighting limonoids, carotenoids, and other intimidating sounding nutrients that do good things in your body.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites