Objectify This! Opening

The best thing about going to school in Chicago is that there’s never a lack of things going on around here.  I was pretty giddy when I heard Street Anatomy’s Vanessa Ruiz was curating a show only about one L stop away, and even more ridiculously excited when I saw it featured on Juxtapoz Magazine’s site.  And I was going.  To an event featured on Juxtapoz.  I felt like I had finally entered the art world. Cincinnati’s art scene is great, but this was the major league (atleast as far as my experiences had been).  And the event really didn’t disappoint.

Objectify This! essentially summed up everything I ever tried to do in my BFA senior thesis.  Beautifully painted female nudes, exposing what was under the skin. One of my favorite artists was there: Fernando Vicente (who I had researched during my BFA thesis), plus some of my now other favorites (where have you been all my life?).  There were anatomy-themed burlesque performances and little anatomically correct heart chocolates that oozed red filling.  It seems like the show as made for me.  If I only had my mohawk, I could have died happy.

Surgical Sketching

I’ve already lost track of how many weeks into the Fall semester (and my 2nd year at BVIS), and there is already a ton going on.  One of the more exciting things happening is Surgical Illustration.

I love observing surgery. I’m not entirely sure there’s much else to say about that. Last week we had the review of our “surgical scavenger hunt,” which we went into a bunch of different surgeries and sketched out certain elements of an operation: closure, dissection, hemostasis, tissue manipulation, etc.

I was pretty nervous about sketching in the OR.  I was sure I would knock something over, trip a surgeon, or some other apocalyptic accident.  Fortunately, things so far have been smooth.  Getting my sketching technique down was a little difficult at first too. With all the digital work going on, it’s been awhile since I sketched from life, and even longer since I sketched something moving. Naturally, I have a really fluid, sketchy style of drawing – which the pace of the OR didn’t accommodate.  I finally got into the flow (on of all days, the last day).

 

Gastric Ulcers

Short and sweet.  A simple 3D model of stomach with gastric ulcer sculpted and painted in Zbrush, which I just used for the first time.  Although I was able to get used to the sculpting in ZBrush, it was definitely a struggle to get used to painting with it.  And even though I was warned, I learned the hard way how unfriendly the UI for Zbrush is, especially for a first time use and coming directly from Mudbox.

Future Plans:  find out an effective way to cut a straight edge in Zbrush and  fix the whole “someone took a bite out of my stomach” vibe.

Faking it: a 3D Polycystic Kidney

This is the (mostly) finalized render of my Polycystic Kidney.  It was sculpted and painted initially in Mudbox (based on photos of real polycystic kidneys) and exported into 3D Studio Max as a lower poly model (a model that is not as exact, but a much smaller file size).  It then had to be (constantly) adjusted to emulate what I had made in Mudbox.Image

With an accurate, healthy kidney I extracted from Mimics (the program that generates 3D models from patient scans), I made this magazine spread/ad.  The scene was lit entirely in 3D Studio Max and small adjustments made in Photoshop.

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