Anatomy and Art

a blog by Sara Egner

Archive for the ‘references’ tag

Reference Desktop Wallpaper

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The fine folks over at WDL (Web Design Ledger) have put up a nice little collection of helpful desktop images for designers, particularly those of you who work with web media.  Some of these look downright helpful.

This and others, can be found at…
http://webdesignledger.com/resources/8-cheat-sheet-wallpapers-for-designers-and-developers

Thanks WDL!

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September 20th, 2012 at 11:04 pm

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Scientific Illustration Tumblr

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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!**

Written by Sara

June 2nd, 2011 at 2:43 am

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Artnatomy/Artnatomia

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As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been working on learning Flash lately. In my own development with the program, I just figured out how to create a button to stop an animation and play it again today. So I’ve still got a ways to go there.  But just tonight, I stumbled across a far more advanced interactive.

The interactive is one that covers the muscles of facial expression.  It’s called  Artnatomy, or if you choose to view it in Spanish, Artnatomia.

Now first of all I’m psyched to see a project like this expressed bilingually.  I may well be coming back to it for reference, when I attempt my own Spanish translation with the animation I am doing for my project research.  A few of the muscles right around the nose look to be labeled a little bit differently than I remember them from my own studies, but I think this may simply be a matter of translation, or even using different sources in Spain.

Secondly, I like the artwork, and the ability to toggle between a schematic or naturalistic model, and with or without the skull.   The site’s design puts a few steps between you and getting to the application, but just follow from the home page through your selected language, and into the application, where you will most likely want to view “Level II” so that you can get the various emotional expressions tied to these muscles.  If you are like me, you’ll spend at least a few moments thinking but hey, sometimes doubt looks differently than that, or people don’t always look the same when they’re about to cry, but I guarantee you that you won’t find a single text book covering the same material that doesn’t make you question similarly.  And once you get past that natural argumentativeness, I think you’ll agree that this is a really cool interactive project they’ve put together here.

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July 5th, 2010 at 11:01 pm

Science Photo Library

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So I was tracking down the image below, and discovered a new resource for good scientific images.

The website it came from is http://www.sciencephoto.com/.  The image itself is credited to Professors P.M. Motta, P.M. Andrews, K.R. Porter “& J. Vial.  Apparently, this is what one can do with an electron micgrograph and some skill with color.  This is actually the shot that first made me understand that there are two kinds of striation in skeletal muscle, the actual fibers, and then the banding created by the myofilaments arranged inside.  Take a close look!

Written by Sara

November 24th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

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References

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I was thinking about references today.  I think that these days, most artists have at least a folder if not several in their computers harboring various images we’ve found and grabbed over the years.  But where do you go when you’re looking for something new?  Sometimes you just need a kick, some bit of inspiration, or some anatomical reference that your own collection just doesn’t cover.

So here are just a few sites that I like to look at for such matters.
Please comment with your own favorites if you have some that you’d like to share.

I suppose the obvious one, is Vanessa’s Think Anatomy site which highlights all sorts of cool new things and links to a lot of good anatomy references.
http://thinkanatomy.com/

Tsvetomir Georgiev is doing some really neat work with 3ds Max and ZBrush that will get you thinking about just what all can be done there.
http://ceco.cgsociety.org/gallery/

A friend sent this link to me a long time ago, and I still keep it bookmarked for any time I want to look at interesting faces.  These are mostly older faces, with lots of wrinkles.  Some of them are exaggerated just a bit with use of a wide angle lens, or just by letting the model’s own glasses affect the look of their face.  They are great character shots though, and I’d be happy to sing praise of the photographer if only I could read Russian well enough to know which of these strings of letters was in fact his or her name.
http://www.interesno.dn.ua/interesting-photo/interesting-photo-people/8-photo-interesting-people/242-homo

Another site I’ve been getting a lot out of lately is the LiveJournal blog of Riotclitshave.  As the name suggest’s, not all of the images are exactly family or work friendly.  They’re not particularly anatomical in nature either, but I have found her posted collection to be really helpful at times with more than a couple projects now.
http://riotclitshave.livejournal.com/

When looking for skeletal reference, I often come back to some photos I took myself, back when I had bones lying around the apartment for a class.  I did one shoot with a box of bones, and another with a skull I had over here last semester.  These shots don’t so much utilize the upper left hand light rule, but they are good clear shots of bones, and bone features.
http://snapshotgenius.com/gallery/bonebox

http://snapshotgenius.com/gallery/skull-A188

Written by Sara

August 16th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

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