lungs and such

i'm currently in a human anatomy illustration course, and it's definitely a lot more challenging than i imagined! We have been drawing from specimens in Grant's Museum. At first i thought the observational sketching was going pretty smoothly, but there was a catch... We have to make the material look life-like, though we are drawing from cadaver material. i find this to be the most difficult aspect (so far). i've been consulting textbooks, professors, and harrassing medical students and colleagues. They've been of great help, but i still haven't found solutions to all of my problems...

But i did manage to solve one problem today! Since i am taking anatomy with the first year medical students, i also have the enormous privilege of having cadavers to learn from. i was struggling a lot with the lungs (see below), as the preserved material in Grant's Museum hasn't exactly aged well... Coincidentally, we did our lab on lungs today and i was able to reference from an actual lung in my hand. It was pretty amazing! Being able to see the lungs in real life was extremely helpful, and i think i've worked out how the lungs should look when pulled back to show the hili...

Here is the preliminary sketch i did in Grant's Museum (we weren't supposed to shade, but i cheated a little :D)

observational sketch
graphite on bond paper, 11x14"

The clean, line drawing with lots of anatomical errors! (i have a hand-labelled version, will scan that eventually)

clean lines
0.5B mechanical pencil on bond paper, 11x14"

Finally, this is my rough plan for my tonal rendering. i found it rather difficult to figure out where the light/shadows would be on all the vessels and such. There are still some anatomical errors i haven't quite figured out yet...

tonal test
SAI 1.01 + Photoshop CS2
Credit also needs to be given to a number of my friends who helped critique this (you know who you are 8D;;;)

i also have at least two other versions lying around, so not used to redrawing stuff so many times! But i guess i'd better get used to it. :P Now i have to render this using carbon dust... i will be attempting to do so tomorrow...