Visualizing the Biological

Superficially, drawing – and all forms of art/design – seem like very relaxing activities.  You’re sitting/standing relatively still, perhaps glancing at a subject and making some marks on a piece of paper.  No extreme heights, circus tricks, or public speaking necessary.  But if you’re the one making the marks on the paper, and you’re actually involved with what you’re doing, then you know how aware, focused, and calculating the act of drawing really is.

I’ve found in my sketching lately that the past semester has driven into me an even more intense way of observing my subjects.  Foremost is composition and page placement. Following that is proportions and the structure of the subject: overall proportions to measure against small proportions with my eye, and the drawing’s proportions to match these.  Form, planes, angles, and dimension all come into play.  Then there’s line weight to consider, the lighting to record, shadows and highlights.  Your eyes are jumping between the subject and the drawing – measuring, studying, and informing your hand what to do.

For the most part you’re working on one of these elements of the drawing and not the others, but it’s important to constantly be aware of how your lighting choices are affecting proportion, how form interacts with the whole composition.  It’s the constant battle of being highly involved with the mark being made at the present without losing awareness of how it’s changing the piece as a whole – a bit of a catch 22.  To add another analogy, you need to see the forest and the trees at the same time, and not crash into anything.  In the end, everything should interact gracefully.

To see some great observational drawing and painting in actiona, browse a blog I love that I only wished was updated more frequently: http://www.artdemonstrations.com/

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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibition devoted to early scientific photography, and the wonderful structures it was able to reveal from 1840 to 1900.  It’s up through January 4th 2009, and if I wasn’t stuck in the frozen wastelands of the midwest, I would definitely see this in person.  As it is, the images on the site will have to suffice.

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With the holidays coming, and more visits with friends and families expected, there will be more conversations and questions about Medical Illustration as a field. That’s not surprising, because it’s a field that’s more effervescent than concrete in most people’s minds.  Everyone has seen anatomy drawings, text book illustrations, patient education pamphlets, and posters adorning health clinic rooms, but few of them realize there are careers behind these designs and illustrations.  No doubt, some will ask this: “Hasn’t Netter drawn all the images already?” or declare this “Wow with photography being like it is I didn’t think they still had illustrators”.

The first issue is simplest to tackle.  While it’s true there are a myriad of medical illustration images available online, it’s hardly true that everything is known about the body or that everything has been shown in every possible way.  It would be like saying all the music has already been composed or all the books written, and there isn’t a single thing to say that hasn’t been said before.  Micro and cell biology on it’s own is exploding as a field.  There are new entries and structures added daily to the invaluable Protein Data Bank, new designer drugs being tested, and new research on diseases.  These all need to be illustrated and visually clarified, for the benefit of other researchers, doctors, and the public.  Even in the field of gross anatomy, I know from my studies this semester that there are images that don’t exist yet that would helped greatly in understanding certain structures.

And as far as the assumption that photography – although a valuable field in and of itself – can take care of everything, you only need to realize that most of what goes on in the body happens at a microscopic level to understand why illustrators are still valuable.  As current technology and limits of science go, it really isn’t possible to record a video of a given pathway inside a cell.  Some aesthetic choices need to be used to really understand certain mechanisms.

But beyond the size and technology issue, there’s the larger idea that drawings are often more useful because they can show things in a way more fitting to how our brains see. Although there’s a panorama of details in our field of vision, we only really focus on one thing at a time.  Illustration (whether the end product is traditional or digital) can enhance some structures and downplay others; they can show things as accurately as they can didactically.  Fat can easily be eliminated, fascia transparantized, and vasculature ghosted.  What needs to be there is, and what isn’t critical to the artwork, isn’t.  Well researched and executed illustrations get to the heart of the image’s message well.

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Here’s round two of two – from dissections in the thorax, abdominal cavities, and posterior thigh. I especially had a lot of fun with the heart – there are many interesting internal structures (like trabeculae carneae and chordae tendinae) and I like the lighter but defined style of sketching I ended up with.

As a note, all of the sketches were done with graphite on 9×12 sized paper, some bristol and others marker paper.

Left ventricle of heart

Small intestine arteries

Spermatic cord and testicle

Kidney and renal vasculature

Piriformis muscle and related vasculature

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As promised, I’m posting first some of my early cadaver sketches, and next time will come the later ones.  I had mixed feelings about this assignment, mostly because of the nature of it.   The beauty of the subject matter isn’t always readily apparent.  Inevitably, and fortunately, I softened up to the weekly assignment once I actually dug into it.  Without further ado:

Internal thorax wall and superior epigastric vessels

Internal cranium and cranial nerves

Palmar side of hand

Left lung hilum

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X-rays aren’t just diagnostic tools; when used in the name of art, they can offer a unique view of ordinary objects.  Consider the work of Steven N. Meyers who photographs mainly botanical subjects.  They have a very graphic appearance – high contrast, hard edges, sharp clarity, and strong figure-ground relationships – all these attributes add up to some very alluring imagery.

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In celebration of turning in my last cadaver sketch of the semester today, I’m writing a manifesto of sorts that outlines how to get one done, and how to get it done well.  These are concepts that are applicable to all sorts of design processes.  A lot of them are common sense, but then, so are most things in hindsight.  Even more exciting than this manifesto, I’ll be posting these sketches online this week, with the earliest (and least successful) first.

1. Decide your story, concept, and/or subject matter.  If you don’t have this clearly defined your drawing’s going to lack focus and organized content right from the start.  Don’t just pick the heart region, decide on something like the great cardiac vessels on the exterior of the heart in relationship to other adjacent thorax structures.  The story is your seed, everything springs from this.  Keep in mind that depending on what you choose, the body might need some “Netterizing” or cleaning up to show structures well.

2.  Know your story.  I.E., know the anatomy that you’re visually explaining. Even if you don’t know all the details from the start, it’s a lot easier to clarify as you’re drawing than to go back into it later, away from the body, and try to figure out what you were drawing.  Related to this, make sure you’re cadaver shows the anatomy accurately – it’s frustrating to draw what you see accurately, and then realize that that cadaver was atypical, or the uretur was misplaced laterally in all the dissecting.

3. Sketch what you need in the lab.  Draw what’s related to the story, maybe a little more, but no less.  It’s more difficult to take away structures than add them.  And ‘draw’ means the basics of the story: proportions, dimensions, basic sense of form and landscape, and relationships between structures.  This initial sketch should be loose (nothing tonally heavy) but detailed- all the information you need to flesh it out later.

4. Finish and label the sketch, outside of lab.  Confirm what you’ve drawn from other references, adjusting details (this doesn’t at all mean copy) as necessary.  Here too, is where you lay in slightly more tone and/or line work to clarify structures, edges, form, texture, and the sense of light.  The “finished sketch” is not a finished drawing per se, but it should be clear, detailed, and get your point across well.  And the labels – add labels on a cover sheet to the sketch.

That’s it!  Don’t overwork it, just draw what you need, and don’t forget to try to enjoy the subject matter.  There’s beauty in really unexpected places inside the body.

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This week’s pick for some inspirational images are the anatomical drawings of artist David Jon Kassan.  Shown below are thumbnails of the some of the drawings, in fact done for a Portrait Anatomicae book for students.  What attracts me most to his drawings (larger images available on his website) is that they maintain elegance and evidence of the artists hand while giving the audience a lot of information about proportions, form, lighting, and anatomical relationships.  The vignetting on the peripheral parts of the drawings further help focus the viewer on what’s important.  Stylistically, they’re loose but structural, sketchy but detailed, and beautiful but functional.  And in a way, that’s a large issue in any instructional design field – portraying something accurately and clearly without making the piece so literal and didactic that you end up sacrificing aesthetics.  Kassan has clearly not fallen for this trap.

Eye Study

Skull Study

Foot study for drawing magazine

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This video is fairly amazing:

Interactive Video Object Manipulation from Dan Goldman on Vimeo.

You can jump to all kinds of conclusions after seeing development success like this.  Although still a long way from being applicable in programs (and notice there were several seconds of wait time after commands), it makes you question how far technology will get during your lifetime.

Richard Powers’ novel “Plowing the Dark” claimed that eventually technology will erase the need for any kind of technique.  The skill will be solely in our cognitive decisions, every thing else will happen at the click of button.  The absolute free flow of creativity, without poor draftsmanship to get in the way.  Imagine doing a cross section of a heart – grab some online 3D heart information, click an option to typify proportions to a middle aged white male, crop dimensions that aren’t needed, quickly choose a color palette and lighting style, and then a brushstroke style, maybe something old-school like conte crayon texture.  Viola, 5 minutes and it’s done.

If that ever becomes reality, it would be as crushing as liberating. As easy as that would be – imagine all the stylistic options you could choose from and other options to play around with (show blood, zoom in on certain structures?) – I doubt it would be as satisfying as finishing a great illustration that amongst your schedule and deadlines and other projects, took a few weeks.  Here’s betting that artists would still paint still lifes, sketch nudes, and anything else just for the love of the technique, the use of your eye, and feel of medium in your hands. Maybe I’ve jumped to conclusions, but we’ve seen incredible changes in the last 20 years alone.  Seems like one of the few things missing from childhood visions of 2008 is hovercrafts.

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Animals that (who?/which?) paint, and any interpretation of their paintings, is a subject that can open a whole bottle of worms about color sense, creativity, and intellectual ability in human and animal minds. The Great Ape Trust of Des Moines, Iowa held a November long exhibit of paintings done entirely or in part by their resident apes.  Quite a few have been sold, too, as the example below betrays:

"Watermelon", painted by Kanzi

I’m a large believer in the capability of animals to feel emotions, make tools, rationalize through a series of causes and events, and do a whole cast of activities that decades ago were labeled purely human.  In fact, I wouldn’t mind having an ape painting on my own wall. But at the same time I’m skeptical about assumptions drawn from animals doing art.  For instance, several of these paintings were titled by the apes themselves, but do they really have the language capability to do so?  On the subject of the works themselves, how conscious are the apes about the imagery they produce – i.e. are these valid pieces of ‘art’? Is there any difference between these works and the scribblings of a 12 mo. old human?  Does color choice have anything to do with individual ape personality or mood?  Beyond the subject of creativity, do their overall color choices admit anything about how apes see color compared to human color vision.  My, quite a few research dollars could go into answering these questions.  Comments welcome.

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