Anatomy and Art

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.