When was the last time someone paid for your signature?

There is the remote possibility that I will burn in Fine Artist hell for saying this but I think Norman Rockwell is the greatest artist ever born. I also like Monet and think Robert Frost is a darn good poet! The thing about Rockwell is…the guy could really tell a story. He was a draftsman, a storyteller, a painter and apparently a shrewd business man. I mean, when was the last time someone paid for your signature?

Medical Illustration often lends itself to pretty straightforward topics. I was kicking around ideas for a piece when Rebecca forwarded me a post on Tumor Paint. I’m not sure if I had been looking at Rockwell’s art lately or where the idea came from but it made complete sense to me. A surgeon painting a brain tumor as a play on a famous Rockwell painting (ok, almost all of them are at least somewhat famous) his Triple Self Portrait.

In this blog I try to show how an idea is developed so here are the planning sketches and work in-progress for this piece.

This is the initial idea concept sketch. These are usually really loose sketches intended to just get some ideas onto paper. Typically I will make a few of these to try out different solutions. This time, I really liked my first idea.

 

Here is a slightly more thought out version adapted to fit onto a particular journal cover.

 

This is a fairly refined pencil sketch. The portrait on the canvas is our babysitter Tatiana and the surgeon is played by medical illustrator John Daugherty (he was my faculty advisor at UIC and he is a good sport). The good folks in surgery at UIC provided all the clothing. First they looked at me like I was nuts… and then they gathered up what I asked for.

 

This is an in progress Photoshop painting from the final. I’ve never done an oil painting technique in Photoshop before but it is kind of fun. Dries a lot faster than real oils!

Eight days later  – the completed illustration and cover mock-up.

Not That Kind of Dissection

This is a medical-legal piece showing a dissection of the internal carotid artery. In this instance the word dissection does not refer to cutting something up to study.  Here it is a tearing away of the interior wall of the carotid artery due to a spontaneous or traumatic injury. While once considered uncommon, spontaneous dissection is now known to be a cause of stroke among the middle-aged. Traumatic dissection on the other hand is caused by severe trauma to the head or neck – typically motor vehicle accidents and rapid deceleration but there are documented cases of dissection due to chiropractic adjustments. I actually have a chiro appointment tomorrow morning so let’s hope for the best.

This first sketch is to show normal blood flow through the internal carotid artery.

The second sketch shows a tear in the tunica intima layer of the arterial wall and the resulting thrombus (blood clot) that forms. The artery is made up of three walls. From the inside to the outside they are the tunica intima, tunica media, and tunica adventitia. You can see a detailed sketch of the layers on the first image.

The third sketch shows the emboli that are formed as portions of the thrombus break away and enter the blood flow.

The final sketch shows the emboli making its way to the middle cerebral artery where it will block blood flow to the surrounding brain tissue resulting in stroke.

Here are the layout sketches.

It’s All in the Prep Work

One of my newest works is an eye cross section from above (superior) and from behind (posterior) that I finished a couple weeks ago. I also included the planning sketch. The thickness of each layer is very important to the overall accuracy and a lot of time was spent in the sketching stage to make sure all the proportions were correct. Fun project and I’m pretty pleased with the final. It’s a combination of pencil and Photoshop. All the circles, ovals, and arcs in the final were drawn by hand – tedious work, but well worth the effort.