Media: graphite, photoshop
It’s ironic that the baby’s head is never shown, when the surgery is all about getting the full term fetus out, but it never became necessary to show the head.
Cesarean section surgical illustration, with emphasis on suture layers
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
Final comps for the porcine surgical piece – in this case, the removal of both the ovaries and uterus. Steps were limited to 3-5 within 1 or 2 plates, plus and image for orientation, and minimalism in content was pushed. This kind of illustration would be in a journal, accompanying an article, and the idea is that those readers would have the background knowledge to be able to recognize these relatively abstract tissue shapes.
Media: crowquill pen and ink, Illustrator, final format in bitmap.
Porcine ovariohysterectomy, page 1
Porcine ovariohysterectomy, page 2
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.
