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.