Internal Palm and Digits.
Date: April 12, 2021
Medium: Carbon dust, Adobe Photoshop
Audience: Medical Students
Purpose: To visualize the internal structure of an organ (the hand) and demonstrate spatial relationships among anatomical features that may not be visible with a complex dissection.
DEVELOPMENT 1: TEXTBOOK REFERENCES
Showing the unseeable: this project was about choosing an anatomical region and peeling away the superficial layers to reveal the anatomy underneath. The goal of this project was also to illustrate the chosen region from an unconventional view not often found in medical textbooks and atlases.
DEVELOPMENT 2: IDEATION
I decided to illustrate the internal structures of the anterior hand in which the skin and fascia have been peeled back to see the multiple layers of muscle, blood vessels, nerves and ligaments. The idea was that as we look at the hand and digits from left to right, we see the structures deep to superficial.
The first stage was about ideation and about understanding the placement of structures within the hand. I decided on creating a ‘skin flap’ peeled away to see the underlying cut tendons, muscles, arteries, veins and nerves.
DEVELOPMENT 3: SKETCHING
I decided to reflect the venous network of the hand along with the skin and fascia in order to simplify the complexity of the structures I would be visualizing in the palm and digits. Because digital branches of the ulnar nerve are also reflected, their organization is reversed. I also decided to remove the palmaris longus as I was already reflecting the tendons of flexor digitorum superficialis and flexor digitorum profundus and this area would’ve gotten disorganized.
This stage consisted of bringing the sketch into Illustrator and cleaning up the lines. An enormous challenge of this piece was ensuring each structure was correctly placed in this extremely packed area of the body.
DEVELOPMENT 4: RENDERING
The final stage of the piece was created using carbon dust for the overall global shading and graphite pencil for the details. They b & w copy was then scanned and colourized in photoshop.
