Archive for December, 2009

My Left Ear

My Left Ear

After drawing all the ossicles I thought I would come outside the body for a change and voila! My left ear. Considering it was back in Frebruary I drew my left foot , you can expect an entire self portrait by 2056.

One word of advice to anyone taking a close up picture of their ear, DO NOT USE A REALLY STRONG FLASH!

The drawing itself was done with the usual culprit of pencils, but to note; the skin around the ear I did with a HB and used bluetack to lighten it – a tip I have seen on a couple of websites.

Again, a word of warning about keeping finger grease of the paper, it really can be a pain. If you zoom into the top of the helix you might be able to make out where I have tried to hide it.  I’m struggling to do this on an A5 pad and when you look at artists working a lot bigger than I, such as Clive Meredith the mind boggles.

Related Posts:

• My Left Eye
• The Ossicles
• Anterolateral View Of The Inner Ear

Blind Sketch #8

Blind Sketch #8

As you can see he is still missing an arm.

I have added to the right hand side of my blog – right near the bottom, a blog roll for some other artists blogs that I follow.

The artists are all of different abilities and the main reason I have chosen to follow them is I find their commentary refreshing and honest.

Its not very prominent at the moment, If someone knows of a good wordpress plug in for blogrolls let us know, drop us a comment.

Related Posts:

• Blind Sketch #7
• Blind Sketch #6
• Blind Sketch #5

The Ossicles

Anterior View of the Ossicles

After sketching all the individual bones, here are all three of them together in situ, but what do they do ? These three small bones (the hammer. The Anvil & Stirrup) carry sound waves from the ear drum to the Cochlea and its a nice bit of mechanics.

First of all, sound waves hit the tympanic membrane (AKA as the Ear Drum) , the vibrations are then carried through the Malleus, Incus and finally the stapes which then takes these vibrations  to the inner ear.   They effectively act as a lever and give a mechanical advantage, by not just the lever effect, but also my reducing the area of force. If the sound waves went direct from the ear drum to the inner ear, they would be a lot  weaker – Its a nice bit of design.

There are also  muscles attached to the ossicles which can control the extent of movement which is believed to protect the inner ear from loud noises. Interestingly  in Bats, these muscles are highly developed and seem to be crucial in their sonar and echolocation senses.

So there you have it  ladies and gentlemen, the Ossicles. As for the drawing itself, I’m not too happy with it. Not just because I used my old pad after the luxury of using the heavier a5 pad, but because  after mentioning last week about looking at other areas when it comes to shading, I started all guns in on the Malleus with a 6B which didn’t really give us much room for shading darker areas afterwards. Thankfully the HB came to the rescue on the Tymponic cavity, but my original intention was to have that darker and the ossicles lighter.

Related Posts:

• Ossicles – Incus
• Ossicles – Malleus
• Ossicles – Stapes

Blind Sketch #7

Blind Sketch #7

Yet to replace my Manikin so he is still missing one arm. When I  do finally get around to replacing it, may go for a hand manikin

Related Posts:

• Blind Sketch #6
• Blind Sketch #5
• Blind Sketch #4