Buttnekkiddoodles

Returned to the Human Anatomy Lab and positioned myself at the head of the gurney looking from the top of the cadaver towards the abdomen and lower features. The scalp had been pulled off of the skull and draped over the face. The top of the skull was removed and the brain was also removed.
 
so my challenge is to clarify what I’m looking at. As the dissections take place over several weeks, even months and the students are removing skin, muscles, bones, vessels and other features to examine internal structures, it can get quite tricky to identify anatomical features and produce drawings in which there is a clear understanding of what one is looking at. The above drawings depict the head, neck and upper thoracic region and a feature you might expect to see are the clavicle bones.
However, in all three drawings there is some mystery as to what has become of the two bones, each which rest one end on the top of a shoulder and the other on the top of the sternum. In the view on and inverted marble sculpture, you can see the distinctive ridge of each which are also connected to the neck by the powerful sternocleidomastoid muscle which attaches to the lower rear of the mastoid process of the skull situated behind the ear.

so in the top drawing and the following detail of that drawing, you can see a continuous boney ridge between the the exposed cavity below the rib cage and the scale which rest on the cadaver’s face. But how can this be? The clavicle consist of two bones which rest on the top of the sternum and crest the U shape you witness beneath the Adam’s Apple.
      
 
It’s quite obvious my drawing has created confusion and the question is,”What is the structure as illustrated. I ran out of time to further investigate and more closely examine the feature and therefore its role in the architecture of the upper thoracic region and the neck in particular. It also goes to the heart of what is the challenge of drawing how one perceives the visual world, and the role of interpretation of visual phenomena.
The next entry in Butt Nellie Doodles will expand this inquiry.

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.