Making babies! (Final chapter)

Here are my final illustration boards on medical malpractice case (part II for case background):

Maternal-fetal relationships during labour
Graphite + Adobe Photoshop CS4 + Illustrator CS4

In my (limited) experience, getting through the drafting stage where you're working out all the nitty-gritty scientific details (especially important in medical legal visualization) usually presents the greatest challenges. After all of the research, critiques, and verification of scientific accuracy, rendering is usually where I can relax a bit. But surprisingly, I ran into a lot of difficulty with this project.

As a friend pointed out, I tend to use flatter colours with low-moderate contrast (reminiscent of the anime drawing habits I'll never escape!). So I had many issues with capturing the depth of the birth canal and pelvis. Anyway, I tried my best to remedy that with darker shadows and greater contrast. It's something I need to work on!

For those who are interested, here are some progress shots:


You know you're on the road to becoming a medical illustrator when you feel no awkwardness from spending hours rendering up that inferior view lol!

Cubes of...pee?

For pathology class, we continued to explore our topics through tissue cube studies. I am working to visualize the progression of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), a condition in which numerous fluid-filled cysts develop in the kidney from parts of the nephron and/or collecting ducts.

Tissue cube study

graphite on paper, 11x14"

To be honest, I wasn't overly inspired with this assignment compared to my "nephron forest" (my initial sketches are equally uninspired, so I shall spare you, dear reader ;D). Perhaps it was a mistake to try to draw the details of every single little cell (talk about tedious work!) - I'm not too thrilled with the overall result. The perspective also got a bit wonky... Ah well, we shall see where the final pathology illustration takes me!

PS. Happy Turkey Day! :)

The forest of nephrons

...or "forest of pee" as some like to call it. For pathology class, we were asked to draw a tissue landscape. I chose to draw kidney tissue and quickly realized I'd be tackling an environment packed with squiggly tubes. After my (genius) classmate made a comment about how the nephron and collecting duct system looks like a tree, I started imagining what it'd be like to look up in a forest of nephrons.

nephron forest
graphite on paper, 11x14"

Process: I am a ridiculously messy artist when I first start. The scribbles in the bottom left were actually my first conceptions of this "forest":


Even when I'm trying to be clean, it still turns out horribly messy. After completing the sketch with blue Col-erase pencil and graphite, I had to scan it and take out the blue channel. I then printed it and traced over it. I need to learn to work more cleanly the first time around (and thus, more efficiently)!


Truthfully, I'm not very happy with the overall result. It seemed like a good idea at the time?! In hindsight, I think it would have been more effective if I showed more depth or used fish-eye/wide-angle distortion to make you feel like you're standing in the middle of the forest, not looking from the outside. I also had some paper issues during rendering and just couldn't get enough contrast in it (I used super smooth paper for graphite rendering, yes I should know better. :P). The lighting was also a challenge - I think I'll make some simple cylinders in Maya or C4D to test out more dramatic lighting. I did scan the lines before shading so perhaps I will try a Photoshop version if I ever have time!

Making babies!

School has begun - which means there will be more biomedical communications work on the way (good-bye personal/anime drawing time)!

There was much talk about making fetuses (or feti as some like to call them) and babies this past week... As a warm-up for our medical-legal course, we were asked to choose an image of a full-term fetus from Williams Obstetrics textbook and rotate it by 90 degrees. This "mental gymnastics" exercise proved to be quite challenging and headache-inducing! Our professor wanted us to practice looking at reference images and drawing them from different perspectives - an important skill in medical-legal illustration.

Here are both the original image (left) and my transposition (right):

Fetus!
graphite on paper, 8.5x11"

Process: I began blocking in the major shapes on a photocopy of the original image. I then pulled lines across the page to mark important landmarks. Once all the major landmarks were in place, I eyeballed it from there. The foreshortened legs gave me a ton of trouble (note evidence of excessive erasing at the fetus' left foot...) so I decided to make a crude plasticine model. I also referenced another image from William's Obstetrics for the fetus' back. After I was reasonably happy with the sketch, I traced over it and scanned the lineart into Photoshop to fix more errors (pointed out by a friend I hassled)! My digital rendering looked terrible so I printed it out and shaded it with graphite instead.


There was some debate during critique about how I portrayed the legs. The legs in the original look rather bendy (our perhaps my distorted perception was influenced by my love for Hyung Tae-Kim's illustrations lol) so although incorrect, I decided to keep them bendy in my interpretation as well lol! There are some other issues with my fetus but I think it's time to move on from this assignment and tackle the next ones!