Here’s a hail back to the master draftsman Lenoardo da Vinci. Lovely style and sense of form and light, of course, and occasionally some very creative anatomy.
All images below via http://www.drawingsofleonardo.org/
View of a Skull, c. 1489
The Principal Organs and Vascular and Urino-Genital Systems of a Woman, c. 1507
Study of Arms and Hands, c. 1474
Want more da Vinci?
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.
I saw some of A.E. London’s wildlife drawings at a Des Moines arts festival last summer. Although the focus isn’t on anatomy or anything medical per se, her work does a wonderful job of expressing the energy of her biological subject as a whole, by using tone, light, and texture.
Go Here to see her work.
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
