Anatomy and Art

I’m so excited.  Tomorrow I get to observe the surgery on which I am basing my project research.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now, so it only seemed appropriate that I post the current version of the script and storyboard I have been working on.

First, the script (click to access the PDF)…

Egner_script

And then the accompanying storyboards…

Two days ago I started a class in Maya.  I’d actually tried to take this one last year, but found the schedule didn’t agree with Gross Anatomy’s schedule, so I put it off.  Well now I have my 2nd chance.  The new teacher is requiring participation over at a Blogspot blog.  Fingers crossed that this won’t turn out to be a terrible idea posting the link here, but check it out if you would like…

http://3dspacefall2010.blogspot.com/

So far, we’ve all just posted out first assignment images.  For this one we were asked to create a simple composition using the basic shapes, or variations of them if we wanted to try some modeling, and render using an occlusion pass.  As you can see there is a pretty huge range of experience and skill levels in the class. For mine, I worked with the basic torus shape and created a composition from that.

Today I am going through a couple of the intro tutorials on Lynda.com and trying to get some good basics down.  I don’t have a copy of Maya at home yet, but the new computer I intend to install it on could be coming any minute now (oh boy!) and I do believe I should have both 3DsMax and Maya on my home machine before the semester ends.  I’m pretty excited about it.  Autodesk’s student software package makes it a really worthwhile deal.

Many of you have no doubt followed Vanessa Ruiz’s blog, Street Anatomy yourself.  But just in case you haven’t, please allow me to pass along the information that she has been putting together a show.  If you’re in the Chicago area, you may just want to give it a look.  It gets started in about a week – September 3rd!

I spent a lot of time in the clinic today and couldn’t stop looking at the pain chart and thinking of this remaking posted over at Hyperbole and a Half…

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html

Brilliant!

Well, I just managed to finish up another painting before the fall semester begins.  This is the first one I’ve ever had offers on before she was even finished.  That’s a new experience for me for sure.  I think that part of the reason for that is that the style I used for her was very clean and streamlined so you actually could see her even in just a cell phone picture.  Anyway, this one was fun to work on.  As is often the case, I was worried at first that I was pulling too much from my primary reference, a photograph found online.  But over time she started to come in to her own and take on a different feel.  I think the biggest turning point with this one was the adopting the clean line style.  I really wanted to use red, but when you try to blend red with a near white, you find yourself with pink, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all.  So I started just playing with the lines, and I think it came out very well.  Anyway, here she is.

So far I’ve just been calling her Red Woman.  Anything else just feels silly.  And yeah, I like her 🙂

These are just a couple of drawings I did this summer for a class.  The focus was on medical instruments.  I thought I would go ahead and post them here.

Wrapping up this recap of the AMI conference, I suppose I should come back in with Saturday morning.  The first lecturer was Leon Speroff, MD who spoke about the beginnings and history of oral contraception, focusing specifically on Gregory Pincus and his work in creating the birth control pill.  The talk was really very positive, but I couldn’t help thinking that I am so glad not to be one of those women that fell into the trial and error portion of learning about the pill.

After that Graham Johnson and Brad Marsh got up and spoke about their work visualizing the pancreatic beta cell with the use of electron microscope tomography.  The big finale is that they are putting together this really extensive 3D atlas of an entire cell by collecting data from smaller scans which can collect better data than anything you can view an entire cell under so far.  This was some really cool work.

Then Scott Fassett got up and spoke about Illustrating for the animation industry.  Most of his work was with Disney.  Beautiful work, but I have to admit to being a touch burnt out on the magic of Disney from my time in LA.  The techniques he discussed were not ones I am likely to use myself, but it was a nice introduction to them.

I would say I found myself the most interested in the panels which followed next.  First on the list was “From Concept to Completion: Real World Development of High End 3D Medical Animations (Part 1 of 2), and then the continuing panel discussion which was part two.  these really brought home for me the value of having a full company from which to do business.  They seemed to have found ways around some of the pitfalls I myself hit in trying to do freelance work right out of college the first time, and a lot of it came down to having the staff, resources, and clientele base to allow a client lots of time to make decisions or change their mind while you are simply working on something else.  That ability to have multiple jobs going at one time struck me as a matter of key importance.  It just isn’t possible to juggle like that while marketing yourself and arranging for new clients when it is just you doing everything.

After that there was another panel discussion that fed right in to the same momentum, called “Your Future as a Self-Employed Medical Illustrator: Starve, Survive, or Flourish?”  This brought out a lot of concerns amongst self-employed medical artists, some of which became rather heated as the discussion continued.  From concerns about marketing, to the increasing outsourcing of jobs overseas, to reinventing ourselves into more complete service providers and resources, there was a lot to take home and process from this discussion.  Business has clearly changed in the last decade or so, and a lot of people are struggling to find new ways of doing business to keep on top of those changes.  I really heard reiterated again and again throughout the conference in it’s entirety, that the push is to offer a more complete service, rather than marketing our work as a final product.  For one thing, we tend to be better at using our illustrations and animations than just anyone putting things together, but we also become more useful to employers when they can hire us to provide a more complete solution to their needs rather than just another piece of the puzzle that needs further management to bring it to it’s audience.

I had to duck out of the  panel discussions just a touch early to get back to the room and dress for that night’s banquet and awards ceremony.

I was signed up to work this one, so I needed to be there a little bit early.  This was a lovely event where everyone dressed up and we had a nice dinner catered while the awards from both the salon entries were given as well as the larger awards recognizing life long achievement and such.  Being so new to the crowd, I think I was most excited to see our very own Matt Cirigliano‘s work take an award.

Congratualations Matt!  And thank you Josy Conklin for the pictures!

If I find out it’s posted anywhere, I will come back here and edit this post to provide a link, but Matt put together this fantastic comic book to teach young students about cell biology.  The parts of it that I have seen look phenomenal.

After the awards ceremony people milled about a bit longer and had those last chats and goodbyes before we all went off to whatever the night held.  I believe for some of my classmates it was karaoke, but for me it was Bridgefest.  I was told a few days prior about the 100th aniversary of the Hawthorne Bridge, and some very lovely friends of friends wanted to take me to the celebrations.  I missed the big band and party on the bridge itself, but made it out to the celebration afterwards just at the end of the bridge featuring live music, beer sales, and fun people all around.  I was even so lucky as to get a comfier room to sleep in that night and an early ride out to the airport with my new friends in the morning.  Not a bad way to end my Portland tour indeed.

Well, I’ve finally done it.  I’ve ordered some business cards.  This time I went through Moo, rather than the simple home print I’ve been getting away with, or Vista (my last professional card printing).  Moo is nice in that you can upload an image to both sides of the card, so you can really design the whole thing in Photoshop if you want.  I went with the same original drawing for artwork as last time.

See my last card…

I noticed last time that business cards don’t just go to business contacts, and handing newly met people who were not in medicine or art a card with breasts like that got a reaction once or twice, so I decided to alter my use and focus on the skeleton and organs this time.    I also decided that in this day and age, having a land line printed on anything other than a company card, just doesn’t fly anymore.  Everyone texts these days.  So even though it is still true that my land line is more reliable than my cell phone, I went with printing the other number this time to better meet with people’s assumptions.  Plus I’m getting better and better at the things I do every day, so maybe it’s time to have a more permanent number listed.  I don’t intend to change that number any time soon, and in fact it is still bears my old Los Angeles 323 area code.

I also went for a little more information regarding what I do this time.  This can be difficult when one’s specialties are broad.  And there is always the debate of whether one should say the least amount possible and let the name stand alone, or the most possible.  This time I worked some clues into the back of the card.  I wanted a title that was applicable to the wide breadth of specialties I now have to offer, so I went with creative solutions specialist.

Here is the new card, front and back…

Well, they’ll actually be cropped just a touch more, particularly at the top and bottom.  I had to do some finagling with the bleed to get the image to align correctly in the card’s design interface online.  For those of you who don’t speak printing language, the bleed is just your extra image in place to cover you in case of shifting or other variability in a printing situation.

I am happy to have been able to only grab a small package of cards this time.  That way I’ll have some in hand, but I don’t feel so wasteful.  The last time I made such a purchase it was for 250, and that was simply too many for my purposes.  I still have cards floating around that give my old LA information.  Moo allowed me to print just 50, which I think will be perfect.  The way I see it, by the time I’m out of school and back working again, I’ll probably have some different ideas about how I want my card to look anyways, and that isn’t far away at all.

Just taking a moment away from the AMI recap to show you one of the major reasons I haven’t had a chance to finish the AMI recap.  I’ve been putting together my very first Flash interactive, and it’s called Poke-a-Brain!

I am personally pretty floored at how much work has gone into this.  For such a silly little interactive, I got in over my head with a couple of the tricks I wanted to pull here.  From the moment I went to coding outside of the code snippets I was a mess, and only by the grace of good friends did it ever come together in it’s final state.

If I want to keep doing these, I have a lot to learn about coding and coding languages. But here’s my first run.

http://anatomyandart.com/poke-a-brain.html

So, to continue the telling of my own personal AMI experience, I suppose I should jump back in at the annual business meeting. Apparently the AMI has this formal meeting every year during the conference.  As a student member, it was a little strange being asked to attend but not as professional members and therefore not to vote.  One couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the required box lunch purchase followed by the realization that it was to get us at a meeting where we were to remain silent.  Just the same, it was an effective tactic. And the meeting did actually provide some good insight as to how the AMI works, and where it stands today.  We seem to be recovering from a recent slump in member numbers over the past several years now.  There seems to be a lot of attention to ideas of branching out, and reinventing ourselves to meet modern needs.  One gets the impression that the medical illustration industry has seen a lot of changes in just the last decade and that there is a lot of uncertainty and just flat out differing opinions out there regarding how best to proceed, be it as individual professionals, or as the AMI group in it’s entirety.

Since that first day, Emily and Meggan had planted the seed that we should pay attention to our observations as first timers.  I guess the thought stuck with me, and I spent a lot of the business meeting jotting down the basic umbrella problems I was hearing alongside my own ideas for little things that might be worth trying.  Sadly I never did manage to get that idea board in my sites, so my thoughts were never really submitted anywhere.  Mostly I just made notes about things like having an open night with friends and family and local medical professionals and students (we were on a university campus) to increase the public’s awareness of us and give attendees an easy opportunity to visit with local friends and family, or creating a separate supporter level AMI membership, or maybe just a magazine subscription.  I figure the work we do is interesting and a couple blurbs, a few interviews, or even just pages of the work submitted to the salon by willing artists would be pretty cool, get what we do out there a little more, and raise funds for the group.  I think the rest was just doodles and something about viewing spaces for animations and interactives.

After the meeting I went into my first shift working for the event.  I had been assigned to work the techniques showcase that afternoon.  As it worked out, I found myself stationed in a room with Nick Klein and Wes Price.  Nick presented some useful action scripting techniques for Flash, a bit of which I have every intention of using in my Poke-a-Brain interactive in the coming week.  Actually, I felt very fortunate to have someone putting out such useful tips while I had my laptop on hand and could work on my own interactive.  He even took a look at it with me at one point when he had a break between sessions. I had a few people comment while I had that up actually, one of which was an artist who specializes in neuroanatomy.  He told me about a professional project happening that follows a similar structure, though it is being done on a larger scale.  I guess I’m not the only one who wants to poke at brains!

And then Wes Price was a pure inspiration with his stop animation pieces. Any concern about working on something so silly as my Poke-a-Brain interactive in such a professional crowd was easily abated by the fantastic ridiculous clips he was showing.  I’ve never really picked up stop-motion myself, other than maybe that one project back in my film school days.  But it’s hard not to love the medium as a viewer.  Somehow I kept happening to catch one of his closing statements “If it’s not tedious, it’s not animation.”  I guess that one stuck with me, and I think it’s going to be running through my head a lot in this week to come, as I work to finish up so many end of semester projects.  Creation takes time and I just have to remember that I’ve put in the hours before and I’ll put them in again the next time.

Well I wish I could say I was able to listen to both Nick and Wes in full for their showcase presentations.  Instead I found myself with the task of managing the Adobe CS5 Design Suite raffle, and giving out 30-day trial CS5 disks.   Having only just recently upgraded my own software to CS5, I was actually pretty familiar with what software comes with the different packages, and found myself ready to answer more Adobe questions that I would have guessed I’d have remembered about the stuff.  A lot of people mistook me for an Adobe representative.  But no, I’m just slow to make purchasing decisions and apparently have been keeping a lot of those package and software comparisons running in my head since the last time I had to do it.

That night we had the silent auction followed by the live auction.  I was a little bit jealous of the arm bone model that Julia Klein came away with there (from scapula to distal phalanges), but over all I was very good about not throwing my money around.  I suppose that kind of thing comes more naturally when there isn’t much to throw.  This night was a big fundraiser night, but it was also fun.  There were lots of raffles, and one particular fundraiser event where we moved these wooden beavers along a grid as money was donated from the various schools attending toward the Vesalius fund.  Each school had decorated their own beaver, and the race was on.

*photo by Kylie Bergam

This actually wound up being our earliest night to be left to our own devices and a bunch of us agreed to meet at Deshutes downtown for a drink.  Actually I think a lot of individual groups from our conference made the same move.  Great minds think alike I guess.  But there were so very many of us, that we found ourselves with a long wait to get a table.  So Josy Conklin (who was also my roommate for the conference) and I decided to make a crash run over to Powell’s Bookstore, the famous bookstore that covers an entire city block and gives you a map upon entry to navigate their many rooms.  Thank you Josy, I am soooo glad we did this.  But at the same time, I can’t help but laugh at the fact that such a giant bookstore was sold out of the one book I was looking for.  One of the speakers had mentioned a book about Mitochondria called Power, Sex, Suicide, Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, and I was curious to check it out, but I guess someone else must have had the same thought.  Oh well.  I wound up picking up a copy just recently though, and it looks really cool.  I can’t wait for the last dregs of this semester to finally wrap up so that I can have the time to read again.

We made it back to Deshutes in time to have a lovely night out with classmates soon to move on, and new acquaintances, and in my own case I had the pleasure of getting an old friend to come join us.  With as much as Portland reminded me of my early years in Austin, what a fantastic surprise that two of my old friends/ neighbors from Austin were living together again as roommates now out in Portland.  And one of them, Ashley Miller, chef extraordinaire, came to visit us that night and meet everyone.

And once again I’m back to working on projects, and will have to postpone the continuation of my Portland story until I can return!