Archive for January, 2010

Lateral View (Third Right Digit)

Firstly, I knew in my last post, that I mentioned that I would be moving on to the eyes. However, I noticed that it is coming up to a year since I started this blog, and I thought I would spend the next few drawings, redoing some of the subjects I did last year, so I can see if i have made any improvement.

First up, is last year I did a skectch of the tendons on a finger.

Click here for the orignal (short!) post

A few things, firstly I have long given up on colour pencils – dont like them, also I can see in the lines in the original drawing , where I haven’t been confident  which results in that squiggly edge. Shading has been done for shading sake. There is not much thought gone into actual shape.

That’s not to say my latest drawing isn’t error free. I made a school boy error from the Vincula Brevia upwards. It took us a while to figure it, but what I did, was instead of drawing what was there, I drew what I knew.

The angle of the original, had been taken looking down.  You can probabnly see where I have drawn the nail with it curving at one perspective before changing it to try and correct the perspective.

Due to the size I was working on, I didn’t have enough room to really correct it properly, as you can see the middle phalanx bone is somewhat darker than the rest of them. Finally, all distal phalanx bones are not created equal, I wanted to draw it more to what I thought it should look like, than what it was.

One thing I am pleased with, is before starting I decided on what pencils I was going to use for certain areas straight from the start.

Tendons Dark  - 2B, HB

Tendons Light – H, 2H

Bone – 2B, 4B

Edging – B

which I’m pleased I did, as I didn’t end up with the situation I had when drawing the Ossicles.

To end, where  I mentioned in my last post about the black smudgy paper I used, this also left a big black smudgy mess on my scanner.

Related Posts:

• Finger Tendons
• Drawing Skeletons – Curves
• Drawing Skeletons – Surfaces

Posterior View of the Cranial Nerves

Posterior View Of Cranial Nerves

Moving away from the ear, my next few posts will be about eyes, but I wanted to first give an idea about the space in which all the aforementioned occupy. In my anatomy books,there are several cross section drawings, of things such as the right tympanic cavity, which is where the middle ears sits and I have got to take my hat off to those folks who do medical illustrations, as I do not feel confident in my ability at the moment to attempt to even do a straight copy of one of these illustrations.

What I did go for in the end was this drawing of the cranial nerves, and as you can see its extremley busy, but trust me, it is tame in comparison to the thympanic cavity. The moment you start adding nerves, muscles, bone it starts getting extremely crowded.

To give you more idea on where we are inside the head, I would suggest you take a look at my Pterygopalatine fossa sketch. We are behind this and I hope its clear in my picture here, that you can see where the skull is, and can picture how that continues to curve round to the pterygopalatine fossa, and of course there is the ear on the right.

Now, take a look at the size of the Incus, compared to a american cent  and take note on my drawing, where I have marked the Mastoid air cells. Everything I have drawn to date with the ear, takes place just above the this and goes from the outer ear, and just past the Sigmoid sinus. Many diagrams of the middle ear will show the Sigmoid sinus on.  Its also interesting to note, if you get an ear infection, those mastoid air cells can get infected, which you really don’t want.  I mention this, to indicate how everything around here is connected.  I hope this description has given you a better picture.

As for the drawing, usual culprit of pencils but new sketchbook, which has shown, shall we say- somewhat interesting characteristics. The sketchbook is by Boldmere, is a 130gsm and cost the grand sum of 99p. It does seem to have the magic ability to blunt any pencil on contact, which has made defining the lines in the drawing somewhat troublesome. The second interesting property it displays, is as regular readers will know, I take great care to avoid finger grease and keep hand contact to a minimum. Even by doing this, I managed to have a hand that was black along one side.

The paper really doesn’t take the graphite that well,its almost like charcoal in some senses, and most of the time during drawing this, I was afraid I was going to end up with a page of black smudge. Thankfully it was bluetac to the rescue.

I have been pondering whether to do a post on the joys I have been finding in using bluetac, but instead I will head you over to this excellent tutorial on the subject by Mike Sibley

Related Posts:

• Anterolateral View Of The Inner Ear
• Anterior Disection of the orbital cavity
• The Ossicles

Anterolateral View Of The Inner Ear

Anterolateral View of the Inner Ear

To finish off the ear (for now!) Here is the Inner ear. You can break the ear down into two main functional parts. There is the Vesitbule which is dedicated to balance, and the Chochlea which is dedicated to hearing.

If we go back to the middle ear for a second, sound waves there have been converted into mechanical vibrations which have then come to the inner ear where the Cochlea then propagates these signals as waves in fluid and membranes and finally transduces them to nerve impulses which are transmitted to the brain. If you have an engineering type chum, ask them about the challenge of converting sound waves into fluid waves and you will get an idea of the complexity of what is going on and thats even before mentioning nerve pulses.

The Vestibule works in conjunction with your sight is responsible for the senses of balance and motion. It uses fluid and tiny hair cells, to get information about attitude, rotation and linear motion of the head, which it converts into pulses and sends to the brain.

Moving onto the drawing, you can see in the top left hand corner a quick rundown of the pencils I used. I’m not entirely happy with the sketch, mainly I think I need a bit of a better reference on the actual surface.

Of interest, I did take some photos of the drawing as I went along, you can see them in the fotki album here (they will be on the last page) and I have added some notes in the photo descriptions. These pictures are also on my flickr stream which you can find from  my previous post.

Related Posts:

• Posterior View of the Cranial Nerves
• The Ossicles
• Ossicles – Incus

Latin Rock #1

Latin Rock

I’ve retired my one arm manikin for now, and have a new model for my warm up excerises. Say Hello to the Latin Rock! This rock I picked up when I was in Canada and visting Mt.Revelstoke . Its a piece of Hematite and I don’t know why, I haven’t thought of using it to draw before as its absolute great.

Firstly, with the aide of a torch I can create hundreds of different shapes, I’ve posted a few pictures up here on flickr, such as this one to show you what I mean.

Secondly, there is the surface;One side of the rock, the iron ore is exposed and is rich in reds and brown and relatively smooth. The other side, is grey and looks like its gone through some heat and compression, which has left grooves and layers.

Thirdly, Its small and fits nicely on the shelve next to my desk and it was free. What more could you want ?

For my first drawing, I thought I would get out just the B pencils that I  use and not worry about detail or shape so much,but instead focus on where I would use those pencils on the drawing.

Related Posts:

• Latin Rock #2
• Warm Up Eric Kennington ‘The War God’
• Speed Sketch #5