Painter is my new favorite design software- it mimics traditional media much more accurately than Photoshop can! The point of this project was to base an illustration on an already inked surgery step. Here are the results, using mostly oil brush options.
Tying off of ovarian vessels
Our current project is a pig surgical illustration piece, which is far more interesting than it sounds. And through the sketches and critiques for this project so far (to be posted eventually), I’ve slowly come to realize why lots** of medical illustration pieces lack a sense of cohesive layout, design, and type sensitivity:
It’s because medical illustrators might never need to deal with it. In fact, they often shouldn’t deal with it- it’s not their job. Their clients don’t need or want a great sense of unified design.
A sketch during the last critique that wasn’t simply piece-meal illustration work received criticism because the different surgical steps wouldn’t be able to be rearranged.
The actual designing is done by art directors and layout designers, and typography is likely done by a different salaried position, too. Surgical pieces especially need to have a great deal of inherent flexibility in how they can be arranged and designed for journal publication.
In these cases, all that design education that says you need to consider the entire space of a given composition is a moot point. And if you do try something crazy like have images overlap each other, the workers for the journal might just chop everything up, thus destroying your handiwork.
So the rule of thumb is design and consider everything visually that you have power over, but allow for flexibility, because in the end, you probably can’t design it all.
**I want to emphasize that there are a great deal of medical illustration pieces that are gorgeous through and through, both from current artists and those back in the day.
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
Rendered in watercolor. I was pushing the limits of the mat board – I hear Strathmore 500 is the better way to go for more technical watercolors like this. However, I am pleased with the mix of warm and cool but subdued color palette.
Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: color variation
This was done with traditional pen and nib- I like the line variation evident in this that you can’t get with technical pens. I’ve seen much more heavily lined intestinal pieces, but I’m a fan of relatively minimalist line work myself. I’m almost getting a hang of this finicky medium.
Intestinal Mesentery Dynamics: Line Variation
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
