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.

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Thanks, Chris Davis.

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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.

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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

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Finals to be posted later.

Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: preliminary sketch

Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: color study

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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

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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.

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We’ll be doing surgical illustration later on this semester, and unlike freshman undergraduate drawing classes where 3 hours were given to meticulously establish proportions of still lifes, or even earlier this semester when project subjects were always on hand, speed will count.  When we’re in the operating room, you can’t request a doctor to ‘hold that pose’, or stop mid-slice.  And forget about aesthetic lighting to enhance form – that’ll have to come later.  At the time, it’ll be glances and furious sketching.  Although past illustrations can be researched for details or certain relationships, I’m a believer that any drawings from direct observation are invaluable.

In anticipation of this, I’m posting several images and links to great painting-a-day blogs and sketches, as much for personal inspiration as for you lucky readers.  I’m not sure how long painting-a-day painters give themselves to finish the work, but it’s certainly short relative to typical oil painting time frames.   The plan is do more rapid sketches myself, and level up in my observational skills.

"Silver Rattle" by Duane Keiser

"Cadmium Red Pigment" by Abbey Ryan

"Bottle and Blue Plate" by Jeff Hayes

"Step Forward" by Carol Marine

Also:

SketchCrawl

Urban Sketchers

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Copyright 2008 Michelle Reinke

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