Anatomy and Art

So, I was going to wait until I’d shown this in my big presentation next month, but I just couldn’t.  I put it up tonight.

Introducing, The Bilateral Sagittal Split Osteotomy and Osseous Genioplasty…

And if that doesn’t work, here’s a direct link to the YouTube page itself – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQI8L5Sxa6w

In other official news, I am officially a member of the International Association of Anaplasatology.

http://www.anaplastology.org/

This site is a great resource for finding an anaplastologist, or just learning more about the field.  And as a member, I’ll have access to journal articles and any job listings that may come up.  I should have done this months ago.

Well, it’s official.  I just submitted the new animation to the AMI for consideration at this summer’s conference.  I still haven’t uploaded it for public viewing yet, but that will come soon.  I had to trim a bit to get the piece within the AMI’s three minute time limit.  I’ll have to decide if I really like those changes or if I want to put any of that back for myself when I am not submitting under that set of rules.  That’s not a decision I have to make tonight though.

Rather, I just spent the last several hours getting all my graphics together for submission alongside the animation itself.  That was my little thumbnail image at the beginning of the post up there.  And then I have the web display image.

And lastly, one that’s more of a poster for the whole thing.

It won’t be long before I’m in Baltimore, meeting up with so many medical illustrators, and all of this will be a finished project.  I’ll even have presented for my graduation by then.  It’s all wrapping up here.

Anyway, I’ll publish the animation itself soon.  In the meantime, phew!

Medical Art Prosthetics is in the news this week!  That’s where I was just doing my anaplastology internship in Dallas, not even two months ago.  Looks like their work with the CPAP masks has been catching some attention here.  You can read all about it, or even watch the KDAF-TV news report here.

http://www.the33tv.com/news/kdaf-custom-fit-cpap-story,0,2709005.story

I’m a little light on time to write these days, but I wanted to share this link to a great article that talks about finding the golden ratio in music.

http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen%20Break%20and%20GR.html

So I was working a little with Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro today to come up with a good looking DVD screen menu for the upcoming animation.  I’m not sure that I’m quite sold on it yet, but I don’t think it’s bad either.

The red is what the button will look like selected or clicked.  The white is what it will look like unclicked.  I don’t actually have a Spanish language version yet, but I do have an initial translation from having run all of my narration dialogue through Yahoo’s Babblefish translator online.  Unfortunately, my Spanish is so poor that I can’t tell if it’s making sense or not.  But if I can just get a few fluent Spanish speakers to look it over for me, I could at least solidify the script, and then it’s a matter of recording that new track, and laying that audio in under the animation for a 2nd version.  I would probably want to tweak the animation a little for that version just to make certain movements time to the appropriate words as they do in English, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of what I can do.  If I have to narrate it myself in Spanish it might not be the prettiest, but I still think even then it would still be worth making.  I suppose if nothing else, I could at least offer Spanish subtitles, and then no one would have to hear my American accent, but especially having read so much about the power of sight and sound combined in education, I’d hate to have people reading the text while they are watching the images and not hearing the words.  I guess I’ll just have to see what winds up being possible as it comes.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of comments and messages on YouTube for my Sliding Filament animation.  Tonight I think I got the best one yet.  Thank you Chrissline77, whoever you are…

Thanks to Youtube and videos like this there is no way anyone should be failing biology, anatomy, or physiology in this day and age.

This video explained to me in 3 minutes what I had trouble understanding after reading a whole chapter.

And it wasn’t even painful.

Beautiful job whoever produced this.

So, some of you reading are no doubt familiar with Tumblr.  Others of you surely are not.  I’ve never signed up for the site myself, but as best as I can tell it’s some kind of a cross between Facebook and WordPress, allowing bloggers to link to each other, and a simplicity of image sharing.  Mostly I’ve only ever run into it myself when image collections pop up in my image searches, but I never quite realized that it was actually a community of people posting those images.  Well, quite recently my attention was drawn to a really amazing Tumblr of Scientific Illustration.  Naturally I had to post the link here.  This is a really great collection here!  I’m so impressed.

The actual Tumblr page looks like this, and you can poke through it for days and days looking at beautiful scientific illustrations…
http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com

Or you can view it, as I originally saw it, in it’s archive form, which will take you into the closer view of the site for any image you click on, with accompanying information about the image’s source and such…
http://scientificillustration.tumblr.com/archive

This one in particular caught my eye first.

Unfortunately I’m having a difficult time finding the illustrator for it, and the original post is in Italian.  It calls it La Straniera though, which according to Babblefish, means The Alien.  That may just be the person who posted it though.

Another Italian gem, this time with a much clearer artist’s attribute is that of Pietro Berrettini da Cortona via the National Library of Medicine‘s Dream Anatomy site.

Or this more colorful piece, right out of my present home city, Chicago.  If I’m catching the tiny printing right, this looked to be created all the way back in 1884 by L.W. Vaggy.

So yeah, the site leaves a bit to be desired in terms of credit to the artists.  But it is a fantastic collection of scientific illustration, and one that grows all the time.  I know I’ll be popping back in to check on it, and see what comes up next.

**edit – Please view the comments section for more artist information and links!**