Posts Tagged ‘Anatomy’

Anterior Disection of the orbital cavity

Anterior Dissection of orbital cavity

Moving onto the anatomy side, here is an Anterior dissection of the right eye. Unlike the ears where I started with the smallest bones and worked out. I wanted to start with the eye, from the outside and work inwards. After doing my sketch of my left eye, this seemed the next logical step.

Its a bit of a creepy image as well, which is always a good thing. A bit of a bombardment of new labels to learn, and I was going to write some of them down for you. But, when looking them up I have come across two excellent images relating to the muscles of the eye (obliques and rectus) which I am going to draw next. It also going to tie back to my drawing of the cranial nerves. so watch this space.

The drawing itself, is a bit elongated in my opinion. I think this might be slightly down to how I was copying it , with it being rested on my knee. I also tried a new sketch pad which I got from Rymans. Its called “The artist A4 sketchpad 180gsm” . It might be good for ink, as the paper is quite solid, but I had a real hard time blending on this. You can probably see, not even zooming in, that the blending is quite harsh.

Unlike the cheap boldmere sketching pad, in which I turned its downfalls to my advantage, I cant see this pad being used for much more than doodling. Save your money.

Related Posts:

• Posterior View of the Cranial Nerves
• Anterolateral View Of The Inner Ear
• Surface of the Iris

Surface of the Iris

Close up of the Iris

I get a lot of traffic to this site, with the search phrase “what to draw in my sketchbook”. Doing a bit of reverse searching on this phrase, I am presuming that a fair deal of these enquiries are to do with people submitting sketchbooks for further education/college. Can’t help there, but I like to think that some people are searching under that term for the pure sake of looking to draw something for fun.

I would highly recommend drawing the suffice of the iris BIG!  My camera that I used to take the picture of my eye for reference in my previous drawing, is 15mb so I was able to zoom into an amazing amount of image detail on the iris.

I started outwards from the pupil with a 6b and then got lighter with the pencils the further I went out. The surface is unbelievable varied with shapes. I tried quite a few different methods to try and get this, which you can see the top is different technique to the bottom.

All in all, a rather fun drawing excerise

Related Posts:

• My Left Eye
• Anterior Disection of the orbital cavity
• Posterior View of the Cranial Nerves

My Left Eye

My Left Eye

Not quite my left eye… I took a photo for reference and ended up with a fair bit of barrel distortion on one side of the photo. I think when drawing this, I over compensated in trying to correct the barrel distortion. The photographer part of mind was in conflict with the drawing part.

I am not a keen fan of drawing eyes. When doing storyboards or concept art, as you can see in some old storyboard drawings here. I find the moment you start drawing eyes, you start defining the character and I’m not arty enough to go down that path.

One tip that has been engraved in my mind, from yonks ago. Is the whites of the eye are never ever pure white. and if you zoom in, you should just be able to see a fine shade over the eye white. This is the third drawing I have done of part of myself, and over at my other blog, I have stitched the three together as a self portrait WIP which you can see here

Related Posts:

• My Left Ear
• The Ossicles
• Anterior Disection of the orbital cavity

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