Anatomy and Art

Picked up test strips of art prints today.  I’ve been enjoying playing with changes in scale on prints, and I think I may try blowing another of my smaller pieces up.

It sounds like I’m going to be doing an art show this spring with Austin’s friendly neighborhood sex shop, Forbidden Fruit.  I’m going to be bringing out a few of my older pieces for this one, especially if they let me display prints.  I’ve been hoping to pull off something new too, though honestly it’s been a while since I’ve been in love or even lust for that matter with anyone and I’m not sure what to make.  I’ve been a bit stuck in the making of new paintings lately, and one thing that’s nice about doing a show is that it gives you a concrete reason to push through a slump like that, or even if it doesn’t, it usually leaves you with new thoughts and feelings about your work afterwards that can often be channeled into new ideas.  Either way, it’ll be good to get my work up again.

I am just returned from Flipside.  And a good time was had.  The theme this year was Unicorns vs. Rainbows: The Reckoning.  As is always the case in battle, the reckoning won.

My string rainbow art project never actually made it up, but the high horse (a plastic horse on top of a ladder, upon which one may say anything) went quite well.  I’m realizing though, that I used to be so much more involved in photographing the event, and I think that’s something that I need to get back to.  Escalating privacy concerns over the years, have left photographers in an awkward space out there.  All in all, there was a lot of really fun artwork out there, and a lot of good people to enjoy it with.  Next stop, my return to Burning Man!  And then I think maybe next year, I might get up to some different kinds of adventures.

I can’t believe I didn’t update here, but I did wind up finishing the new painting.  I’m calling it, “She Wades In” and I’ve been really happy with the response I’ve been getting for her.  The canvas has already been sold and shipped off to Oregon, and I am in the process of selling prints now.

Well it was nearly finished when I posted a draft before to test the new web hosting.  But I finally settled on a final copy of that facial nerve illustration with my friend Ernest, so I thought I’d share that here.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with the skull again at work lately too.  That’s all been based on the Zygote model mostly, defining which parts of the skull go with which individual skull bones and the like.  That and chemistry, which is less relevant to this blog, but it’s been interesting to me just the same.

And at home, I’ve been working a lot on a painting lately.  It’s funny, she started off so green, but I’ve been morphing the color palette over time.

This one is getting really close now and I hope to post the finished work soon.  🙂

I confess, I’ve been fairly consumed with politics lately.  I may write more about some of that here at some point.  But for now, I thought I’d share something fun that I got to work on recently at Macmillan.  Some of you are familiar with the concept of the somatosensory homunculus.  There’s basically this part of the brain where the sensory and motor information signals come and go.  And it’s neat because things always go in a particular order, and there are a lot more neurons for things like the face, and hands than there are for things like your shin.  To help people remember the arrangement, it’s common to draw out a distorted human along that area of the brain.  And I recently got a request to create one of these for just the motor part (sorry, no giant genitalia for those of you who are familiar with the sensory side.)

I feel like I could have exaggerated the prominent features even more, especially the hands, but the idea is still clear.  We dedicate a lot of our neurons to the tongue and lips and overall face, and to each finger, and our wrists.  Comparatively we dedicate a lot less to our toes, our abdominal muscles, our upper arms….

When I was in grad school, a friend of mine once reached out about maybe getting a tattoo done of the homunculus on his head to line up with the part of the brain.  He thought since I was in medical art school, I might have some good ideas for that.  Alas, it was the first I’d heard of it and I was a little too swamped with grad school at the time to oblige him.  But now I got to make one at work.  And maybe someday, if that friend still wants it after all these years, I’ll help him out yet.

Alright, I’m back to being able to post images again, at least for the time being.  And that’s great, because I have an art show starting this weekend.  My own work doesn’t go up until Sunday, but then we’ll be up through the rest of November.  Austin locals do come out!

Well, we wound up deciding not to show with EAST after some rigamarole about showing work in a bar setting as opposed to a working studio.  But the show is on just the same, and we will be there throughout November starting on the 5th.  Do come see us!

http://www.austinartistsnetwork.com

I’ve been working on a little side project lately at work.  For a long time now, I’ve wanted to get into making 3D printable educational materials.  Our focus on accessibility of late may allow me to do just that.  Did you know that you can download a font for braille, just like any other font?  So I’ve been playing around with a braille version of the periodic table of the elements.  Obviously, this does no good in a web image, but when incorporated into a 3D printable file, suddenly useful.

I haven’t had the opportunity to test this with a printer yet, but I’m working toward that.  Once I have that, I can make adjustments to the digital file and perfect it from there.

I think that if I can optimize this for use, and if schools actually download and print them, that this could be a great addition to our educational offerings.  Really, I’m surprised that I don’t see more of this kind of tool around already.  I really think that we will in the years to come.

We’ve been getting into more gross anatomy level illustrations at work lately.  For a lot of images we’re still working with the Zygote model.  But for many views, the model doesn’t quite illustrate what we need.  Last week I spent some time refreshing myself with the bladder and I’m pretty happy with how the final illustration turned out.

It was fun getting into the form and detail of an organ again.  I hadn’t done that for a while.