Posts Tagged ‘Ear’

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

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

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

Ossicles – Incus

Lateral View of the Incus

AKA the Anvil. Unlike the Yves Tanguy Stapes and the Jaws like Malleus who have been quite camera shy, finding images of the incus has not been a problem at all.

In fact I have decided, it is the Lindsay Lohan of the Middle ear.  My drawing is a composite from diagrams from my anatomy booka and the photographs I came across on the web.

One of the nice things about the photos, I was able to get a lot clearer idea of the surface. One of the sites I came across was the Otolaryngology Houston Texas website which has some great pictures (ironically there are pictures of the stapes and malleus there as well, but did not come across this site when I was searching for those terms)

Just a note on doing the composite drawings,  is I am aware of getting something horribly wrong which is where being able to refer to diagrams in my anatomy books help. But I have noticed that a lot of anatomy illustrations will tend to stress a certain part of the picture to fit the context of the article or topic they are discussing. It is subtle but I think it is something you need to be aware of.

I dis start this drawing with a 3B just to see what difference that would make, but quickly abandoned the pencil – it seems superfluos and doesn’t really add anything, so I was back to the usual set of 6B, 2B, B and 4H.  I was also using the 135gsm paper again which I am getting more used to blending on.   With the extending blending properties of the heavier paper, I have come across a negative;  it is more vital to keep finger grease off the drawing and along the short process if you zoom in , you may see how I found that out.

Related Posts:

• The Ossicles
• Ossicles – Malleus
• Ossicles – Stapes

Ossicles – Malleus

The Malleus

Following on from the Stapes, here is the Malleus which is the latin for Hammer.

I wasn’t going to draw it from this angle, but was watching Jaws the other night and – well …

Again had the same problems as drawing the stapes, I can’t work out quite what is happening below the manubrium. My main source for this picture was one of the 19th century Grays Anatomy illustrations from wikipedia.

I am not to keen on using these as sources, as they are more technical illustration than drawing, which the artist would of probably spent six months drawing doric columns before being allowed to study anatomy and then only under strict conditions and with a defined set of rules and guidelines.

Fair credit to them, I would not have the patience to put in half the detail they put into those illustrations.

Related Posts:

• The Ossicles
• Ossicles – Incus
• Ossicles – Stapes