Anatomy meets LEGO in Nathan Sawaya’s latest piece entitled, Heartfelt. I had seen Nathan’s work before when he was a guest on the Colbert Report and I secretly hoped that he would do an anatomical piece out of LEGOs. So imagine my excitement when one of my readers sent me the link to this heart! Thanks Laura.
Nathan is a freelance artist who found his calling using LEGO as an art medium. His studio in New York is filled with approximately 1.5 million LEGO pieces. It would have been a dream of mine as a child to have access to that many LEGO pieces!
Nathan built this anatomically correct heart for the Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. He says, “A piece like this is a great tool to help doctors talk to young patients about their own hearts. Hopefully kids will relate to a heart built from a medium that they are familiar with.”
Next up, LEGO stomach, liver, pancreas, lungs, or brain??
The creator of Skull-A-Day, Noah Scalin, has one simple objective—to make a skull out of anything he can find, everyday for a year.
Noah literally uses any material to make images of skulls, like the fantastic skull made out of dog fur above. He also takes submissions from his readers who send in pictures of their own hand-made skulls or any skull they may happen to find. Skulls are everywhere if you search hard enough.
The year of creating skulls is coming to an end though, Skull-A-Day is currently on skull #342.
So what’s going to happen after skull #365? A vacation for Noah. But due to the overwhelming response from his readers, Skull-A-Day is going to continue for at least another 6 months. He’s going to be turning it over to his readers and will be posting a new skull made by a reader everyday. It’s good to see that it’s not going to come to an end!
The response to Skull-A-Day has been so enormous that it recently won the prestigious Webby People’s Voice Award for the Personal Website Category. Noah says that he doesn’t have a master plan for all the skulls he’s made. Perhaps an exhibit or a book? But for now, you can be sure to get your daily fix of skull imagery at Skull-A-Day.
Here are a few of my favorites from Skull-A-Day.
Oh, and the best part is the Skull-A-Day font. Go to the site and download it yourself, it’s free!
Christopher Huet is considered to be a master at photo retouching. He’s used by all the top ad agencies in the world and there’s no doubt you’ve seen his work in ads for anything from Adidas to Guinness.
Huet says of his work,
My purpose is to make people forget the retouching itself even if it seems obvious because of the singularity of the image.
He certainly succeeds in combining elements to make seamless images. Be sure to look through his portfolio site because he shows the step by step process for retouching each photo. It’s really quite amazing to flip back and forth between each step to see the transformation.
Heather Tompkins is a talented filmaker, illustrator, and designer. She’s got a very fun and creative website that’s definitely worth taking a look through (it’s all hand drawn!).
It looks like her focus is on filmmaking, but her illustrations are excellent. Her line work is loose and expressive, making her illustrations feel very energized and effortless. Hope she considers doing more anatomical work.
One of my readers, Aman Agah, had her wonderful heart tattoo designed by Heather and done by Colby Long.
Big thanks to Aman for letting me know about Heather’s work.
Interesting article in the New York Magazine entitled, “You Walk Wrong,” on how we’re all taking an evolutionary step backward by wearing shoes.
Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”
I’ve received an enormous response so far to the new Anatomical Street Art Gallery. It’s even been featured on one of my favorite blogs, the Wooster Collective, which houses a collection of the best street art from around the world.
I’ve also received numerous submissions from my readers. I’m happy to say that there is a lot more anatomically themed street art out there than I previously thought! Thank you to everyone that submitted photos. I’ll be updating the gallery periodically so feel free to send more along.
Talk about random. Madonna’s new music video for her latest release titled “4 Minutes,” is a montage of her and Justin Timberlake dancing, crawling over cars, and skipping through grocery store aisles.
But what caught my attention were the 4 seconds showing the anatomical cross section of a couple kissing. It’s really quite interesting. I don’t think I’ve seen a cross section animated like this before. And whoever created it did a good job of making it look seamless. Too bad it only lasts 4 seconds.
The scene comes at 1:14.
Reminds me of the work by Koen Hauser. For some reason he took this work off of his portfolio site, but I was able to find this image floating around the Internet.
That’s how many cigarette packs artist Chris Jordan used to make his latest work, “Skull with Cigarette.”
It’s also equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every 6 months.
This piece is part of Jordan’s photographic series entitled Running the Numbers: an American Self-Portrait visually examines the vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.
Skull With Cigarette, 2007 [based on a painting by Van Gogh] 72×98″
See his portfolio to look at other stunning statistical visualizations.
Even teddy bears have skeletal anatomy that is just as cute.
Wool sculptor, Stephanie Metz, created these soft felty skeletons. Her interest lies in,
A pseudo-scientific study of the morphology of skulls: the form and structures that differentiate one breed from another and give a sense of the story of the individual. My approach is to research, document, present, and interpret evidence in a formal manner. My subject species is the teddy bear: a creature made by humans (and made ‘alive’ by imagination) whose morphological history is tied to social trends. My idea of ‘logical’ evidence (a stuffed animal would have a skull made of felt) becomes an emotionally loaded image that brings up a wide range of responses and proves to be ripe for further exploration.
Wonderfully creative. I wonder if Stephanie will consider doing the rest of the teddy bear skeleton?
Related morphological studies of inanimate objects:
Anatomical street art is quite rare, but over the past few months I’ve put together a gallery of real street anatomy. These have been spotted all around the world from cities like Chicago, Paris, and many more. The artists who did these pieces have helped put a little bit of anatomy into the lives of everyday people.Click here to enter the Anatomy Street Art Gallery or find it under the Galleries in the top navigation of this page.Keep an eye out for anatomically themed street art. If you’re lucky enough to spot a piece, please take a photo and send it to misvan@aol.com or submit a link on the Contact page to add it to the Anatomy Street Art Gallery. Help me expand the only collection of anatomical street art currently on the web!
