I have yet to really do that gratuitous eye drawing that every artist at sometime does – so with a little more freetime, I took it up!  Here’s the resulting sketch, from a mirror, in charcoal:

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Happy Valentine’s Day -  we have in the department an incredibly accurate heart model – it’s based on a wax mold from the real thing.  Here are some quick-ish sketches.

Laeral heart model sketch

Posterior heart model drawing

Internal heart model drawing

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites