Street Anatomy

The “Effects” of Corsetry

This rad photo was taken by Demode on Flickr (it’s under the Antwerp album). Needless to say, it does not make me want to wear a corset.

[via FFFFound!]

New work by Bryan Christie

Here are some recent medical works by my number one 3d illustrator,
Bryan Christie.

Gorgeous as usual.

Related post: Beautiful simplicity: the work of Bryan Christie (interview)

Introducing Revealed: a new blog on scientific and medical illustration

I’m proud to introduce a new blog that recently joined our tiny medical illustration blog community. It’s called Revealed: a blog about scientific and medical illustration and all that’s involved. The author is Janet Chao, a first year graduate student in UIC’s Biomedical Visualization program.

Janet’s inspiration to start a blog came two years ago when she first entered scientific illustration. The fact that she “just couldn’t find any websites where people actually talk and share experiences about being a science illustrator,” was disappointing. She goes on to say,

I chose the title “Revealed” because sometimes it just seems like no one knows who scientific and medical illustrators are, what we do, and how we think. I keep getting the same questions, and I can never forget people’s faces when they find out that I’m in school for “medical illustration” instead of “medicine.” I feel like they’re disappointed that I’m not going to graduate and save lives every day. I hope, through this blog, that I can begin to “reveal” who we are by sharing ideas and techniques about projects, getting feedback from people, sharing other people’s works, and in general just starting a community with people who are passionate about scientific and medical illustrations.

Janet’s reason to start Revealed is exactly the same reason I had for starting Street Anatomy. My experience so far has been that people are genuinely interested in how art integrates with medicine and science, but they’re not always aware of the people behind it.

Janet’s blog looks very promising. I look forward to seeing it grow and to see her expand our online community!

Start off by checking out some of these interesting posts from Revealed.

• The making of an Ear Prosthesis series
• Why aren’t illustrators extinct?
• Early illustration/printing
• Interview with Trudy Nicholson - top scratchboard artist

You can also take a look at Janet’s illustration portfolio at Illustration IDeAS.

What a Heart

Illustrating a heart seems to be the right of passage for all aspiring medical illustrators in graduate school. It’s a wonderful exercise in rendering form and achieving a sense of volume using light and shadow. It’s also good practice for rendering those pesky globules of fat.

Jessica Wheat, a second year graduate student in UIC’s Biomedical Visualization program, illustrated this lovely heart. Jessica has a very nice loose painterly style present in all of her work. It makes the anatomy seem more organic and fluid. It’s a nice change from some of the highly stylized and ridged anatomical illustrations we see at times.

View more of Jessica’s work at her portfolio site.

John Bell: Rebelling against the artist

Since the monumental work of Vesalius, the relationship between anatomist and artist has been one of support and dependency. The anatomist depends on the artist to convey complex anatomy in a visually pleasing and clear way and the artist depends on the anatomist for accuracy. They both, in a sense, function to keep each other in check making sure that accuracy isn’t sacrificed for aesthetics and clarity isn’t sacrificed for detail.

But what happens when a stubborn anatomist doesn’t trust the creative eye of an artist?

He decides to do the illustrations himself. (You can almost hear the collective gasp of medical illustrators everywhere!)

The stubborn anatomist here is John Bell (1763-1820). You may recognize the name of his younger brother, Sir Charles Bell of Bell’s Palsy. Bell didn’t believe in the ability of artists and their “vicious practice of drawing from imagination.” Harsh words from a man that had quite an artistic talent himself.

He believed that there was “a continual struggle between the anatomist and the painter, one striving for elegance of form, the other insisting upon accuracy of representation.” In a commitment to true anatomical representation, he decided to solve the problem by drawing, etching and engraving his own illustrations, which would not suffer from “the capricious interference of the artist, whose rule it has too often been to make all beautiful and smooth, leaving no harshness…”

And he truly meant what he said. There’s nothing beautiful about his anatomical illustrations.

The illustrations succeed in being quite harsh. Without the guidance of a skilled artist Bell’s illustrations lack focus, depth, perspective and composition. He illustrates everything with the same amount of emphasis and in doing so loses the focus on the anatomy. The result is an ineffective anatomical illustration.

The artist’s role isn’t simply to make things “beautiful and smooth” as Bell states. It’s to provide clarity, to guide the viewer, to provide the illusion of depth, and above all to make anatomical illustrations effective and educational. Otherwise it’s just copying without interpretation, as Bell did in these illustrations.

Too bad Bell didn’t live long enough to see the invention of photography (1830). He would have loved the camera’s ability to capture the graphic harshness of dissection.

Sources: Vaulted Treasures, Dream Anatomy