Buttnekkiddoodles

A return to Rush Hospital Human Anatomy Lab after a three year hiatus due to the pandemic. Excited to be back at this remarkable facility thanks to the interest and generosity of Rush and Dr. Chris Ferrigno.

During the interim I contacted Coronavirus and lost my sense of smell. It’s been a year plus and I have regained a fraction of my capability to detect smells. As a result, the nostril shocking smell of formaldehyde was at a bare minimum. So, there’s an upside to infection???
Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on Hanemühle Cappuccino paper.

 

several years ago I visited Portland and went to a really pleasant park in the Pearl District of inner city. Loads of people were enjoying the sunny weather and a couple artist friends of mine and I decided to draw folks in the gracious surroundings. There were lots of moms out with their tykes and so I set up to sketch the view just behind one particularly relaxed group that looked really settled in.

Since then, I’ve reviewed this drawing many times having brought it along for many of my demonstrations and classes. Within is a figure of a young woman with a nifty hat that has become rather iconic to me. So I worked up a page of studies of her and how her limbs and muscles behaved in a posture that was both relaxed while requiring the ability to brace herself comfortably. I had my girlfriend pose and I looked at photos of me, shirtless, holding the same pose.
 
you can see relative to the woman next to her, that as her arms support the weight of her torso allowing her spine to curve as if resting against the back of a chair, her shoulders are pushed up, closer to her ears. This lets her head, which weights in the realm of 15 lbs, hang out over her clavicles with her chin just above her sternum. As for the muscles of her back, while they are elongated to follow the arc of her spine, (as shown in the following scan) they are also gathered as the shoulder force compression of her shoulder blades and the trapezius which forms the squeezed diamond shape from her neck to the crest of her shoulders and down to the middle of her back creating a furrow atop her spine.
 
To me, this was a useful exercise to help understand substructure and be mindful of how the body adjust to accommodate its own mass and the way in which some muscles contract while others simultaneously relax. You also become more explicitly aware of the elasticity of the body, at least youthful or limber physiques and the way it shifts to maintain balance against the forces of gravity. A person’s condition also determines what you can “read“ beneath the skin. If you are trying to compose figures from your imagination, studies like these give you loads of valuable info that help you make informed sketches and give your conceptualized drawings naturalism that have suitable proportions,  graceful flow and appear weight bearing, with the defining sub structures in credible locations.

 
These final 2 close ups also show how I like to use directional hatching or mark making in places to help describe the curvature of volume. Known as cross contour drawing, you can see me making use of it on the muscles of the left figure’s back, just as I have done on the marks on the right figure’s hat and pants.

Drawn with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and two fountain pens, the F-C Grip and the F-C Essentio Black Leather, both with Broad nibs on a Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook.

Back into the Human Anatomy Lab at RUSH Hospital twice this week past. Friday I joined Professor Dr. Christopher Ferrigno as his students worked on their dissection assignments.

In the above drawing of a cadaver with considerable dissection on the charts and abdominal cavity, I chose to create a grisaille, or monochrome Gray scale drawing. This features tone and contour but in lacking a wide range of hues or color, makes distinguishing organs much more of a challenge. You may see this trying to differentiate between the heart, seen just above the chin in this view, and the liver which lies directly behind the heart and to the right of it, again relative to this view. What can give greater clarity when using a monochrome scale, would be 1 – employing a subtle shift in grays from cool to warm. The cool gray having a slight blue cast, while the warm gray more of a brown shade. 2 – The strength or width of you countour lines will help distinguish organs one from the other and foreground from background. The character of the organ structure may also affect the contour. So the main lobe of the liver would be a smooth, softly curving line, but the contours of the small intestines would consist of multiple curves of various radius like a thick ribbon folding back on itself again and again. 3 – the surface textures could be very smooth, striated, spotted, mottled, rippled, dimpled, shiny, or covered with small irregular globules of fat. Paying close attention to these sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle distinction will keep your drawings of human tissue from melding in a confusing mass of goulash.

As students work to access organs deeper within the thoracic cavity they have a need to move the intestines out of their way. They were instructed to gather the intestines into a bundle, referred to by  Prof. Ferrigno as the “bouquet”, and set that to the side, as shown in the drawing above. Ink on Toned paper and a Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolor Sketchbook.

Yesterday I had the honor to attend an Artist Anatomy Sketching Session organized by Virginia Ferrante-Iqbal at the RUSH Human Anatomy Lab run by Director James Williams PhD. Before I switched majors to art after three years of college, I had been a bio/chem major. And while I had certainly been in labs and had dissected a few small creatures, I never advanced to the human anatomy labs. The first thing is you will notice a slight hint of formaldehyde but the lab was very well ventilated so that was never an issue. Then you don the gown and enter the main room where there are perhaps a dozen or so tables/gurneys with cadavers in blue tarps. Our subject was revealed and as you can see from my sketches had the skin removed from the body’s left side. A moment of respectful silence and gratitude to the donor, then I got down to business. The session is 3 hours. One aspect I wondered about was my palette selection as I packed my gear the night before. I used Pitt Artist Pens which have a wide range of color but my selection left out some hues I’ll look to include next week. I brought a clipboard as one of my sketchbooks, a Stillman & Birn Nova Series, was a soft cover and wouldn’t have given me much support as I stood to draw while holding my sketchbook. The other book, a Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook had a hard book cover and was well suited to draw and hold on it’s own. I have lots of anatomy books but the clarity you find in most of those books will be different than your experience looking directly upon a cadaver. Connective tissue and the direction or grain of muscle tissue may prove much more confusing than a diagrammatically rendered illustration. That, will be part of the challenge. To draw as faithfully as you see the forms and tissue, or help articulate the structure. An exciting opportunity. There are openings for this lab which meets over the next seven weeks. My thanks to Virginia Ferrante-Iqbal and Dr. Jim Williams.

I returned to the Human Anatomy Lab at Rush Hospital last night and continued drawing from the same cadaver featured last week. More dissection had taken place, as shown here, where the trapezius, still attached to the skull ( the external occipital protuberance to be more exact) having been laid across the towel covering the cadaver’s head. Other muscles around the shoulder/neck area have been partially removed to show substructure. The main muscle of the buttocks, the gluteus maximus has also been partially removed to reveal deeper tissue and the sciatic nerve. In future drawings I will clearly label the muscle groups, bones and key features.

OK, so some days you walk into a life drawing session, maybe relaxed, maybe full of fire, sit down to draw and…”who the f*ck is noodlin’ on my sketchbook?” Even within the course of 3 hours, either Misters Jeckel or Hyde could wrestle away your crayon and push you off your bench.
In the first entry above, first row first column, the model, C, is full figured, very pale and somewhat like alabaster in that she seems to absorb light and seldom has very dark shadows. To make matters trickier, at the Palette and Chisel, the primary venue where I go to draw from the figure, there are scads of fluorescent lights which kill any dramatic chiarscuro. So with C I usually have 2 concerns. (I concede on trying to catch a facial likeness, as portraiture has never seemed to be my bag.) First, try to convey her sculptural, solid form while maintaining her feminine characteristics. Second, avoid overwhelming a translucent presence with tones that are too deep or harsh. Many times I draw her interior contours in grey to keep a tonal delicacy. If she has dark fabrics as a backdrop she becomes a fleshy lightbulb. On this occasion I did a countour drawing of her first with a bold-point, gel pen, some pentimenti, otherwise content with initial lines and proportions. All fine and good so far, then skin tones swept in with a light warm grey Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Brush Pen, used a cool grey PAP on the fabric between her feet and a medium grey for the draped crate she sits on to contrast with her thigh. Twenty five minutes, again, I don’t know if you’d recognize the drawing as C were she to pass you on the street but I can live with the effort. Glance to the right of this drawing, first row second column, or the one underneath that, second row second column, or below that, third row second column and you see things going haywire.
I also attend an open life drawing session elsewhere in Chicago where the model begins with gobs of 20 second and 40 second and 60 second poses. On and on this goes for the first 2 hours until the poses start slowing down to 15-20 minutes. I usually skulk into that joint with a sense of dread of facing my comeuppance. Yea, yea I know, it’s good exercise, good for the craft. Hey I draw on the bus and in public on a regular basis but I psych myself out for some reason at this place. And I’ve had some ego-bruising moments that reminded me of bad matches in high school wrestling where some muthafugga was filing my nose off on the mat. So the drawing at the top of the second column is a page where I’ve reworked a pair of 60 second poses that irked the daylights outta me. You can see a quick study of one of the artists in the group (whose drawings were kickin’ my ass) cause I needed a pause from all that tricky flesh. Later, when I was reviewing the days’ work I obliterated or reworked that and other pages by adding anatomy or wigs or tattooes or high heels or beards or text or just about anything that would make light of the carcrashes that had taken place during the sessions. The standing figure in the second row second column is five timid minutes worth of reworking areas for God knows what reason and stacking a torso on some stumpy little legs. I can’t seem to box in basic shapes or just allow the line to run freely. To the right of that drawing are a couple of 3 minute gesturals that I returned to play with during the model’s breaks, adding a barrel and bone studies to hide my misery.
But it’s the drawing at the bottom of the second column that really shows that at times, two minds are at work on the same page. I’m watching my tones there, I remember moving at a fair clip, quickly notching in some details, torso’s o.k., hands fine, fan and heater good, no fussing around but who stuck the shrunken head on while I went to the bathroom. And how about her left knee? I seem to remember thinking while I was drawing “no…that’s not quite right.” Things seem to be cool, then you’re going off the rails. I mean, it’s why we love drawing from life, no? Decision making with the clock ticking.
At some point, I’ll post a cluster of drawings I’ve done over the years while in transit. Till then, bon chance with yer doodles. Don.