Anatomy and Art

a blog by Sara Egner

Just Finished! From Nose to Brain

with 3 comments

I’ve been working on this piece for a while now.  And I just finished it!!!

This image represents the pathway into our first cranial nerve, the olfactory nerve.  It begins with the olfactory vessicles in the foreground, and follows the signal’s path through the neuroepithelium and lamina propria, on to the skull’s cribiform plate.

For those of you unfamiliar with this part of anatomy, I’m talking about this area in here…

My favorite photo references for this piece came from Kessel’s work for the book “Tissues and Organs: A Text-Atlas of Scanning Electron Microscopy…”

I also found this amazing photo online of nasal mucosa, unfortunately without reference to who the photographer was…

Kessel also had some good line drawings, but my absolute favorite drawn references came from R.V. Krstic’s book, “Human Microscopic Anatomy…”

And then there are lots of examples online of epithelial cells, and how they fit together in a sliced plane…

Part of the process on this one that was interesting, was being able to take exact measurements from Krstic’s work, and line up an exact reference in 3D Studio Max.  This project was a class assignment, and part of the project was to use both 3D modeling software as well as Photoshop to get a better feel for the strengths and weaknesses of both 2D and 3D mediums.  This allowed for a lot of cross pollination of ideas and problem solving.

Initially I just used rectangles, representing the exact measurements of the different layers involved in the scene (ie, the neuroepithelium, the lamina propria, the basement membrane, the cribiform plate).  Then because 3DsMax is a 3D program, I could turn the image any way I wanted to get the best possible view.

From there I was able to get a good sketch.  And then, since I was also developing a 3D image at the same time, that sketch was then helpful in further cultivating what I would model there.  Having a folder of references, I went ahead and made temporary textures for the modeled pieces once they were created, and arranged my view to suit the 2D image I was working towards.  Then with a print out of that, I had the perfect reference to use for my final sketch.

From that point, it was a matter of building up the Photoshop painting around it.  Our class had even already done some work with color schemes, so a lot of that was able to be referenced throughout the process.  This turned out to be an especially good thing for me, when I got sick halfway through putting this together and had to put it on hold for a while.  Having so many references and decisions pre-made turned out to be very helpful in getting myself back into something I hadn’t touched in a while.

I will post the finished 3DsMax image when it is finished as well.

Written by Sara

August 13th, 2009 at 12:42 am