:-)

The book I worked on with my dad, The Atlas of Surgical Techniques in Trauma, won first prize in the surgery category this week at the British Medical Association Medical Book Awards! 

Blunt Force Trauma

Western Schools saw this old illustration of blunt force trauma to the chest, and they asked to use it in one of their books. The silhouette is my friend (and excellent scientific illustrator) Sean Edgerton. I could have invented an outline, but it's fun putting friends and family into medical textbooks.




the original was in color, but it reproduced pretty well in black and white.

New Medical Illustrations

I've been working on 100 (!!) new illustrations for a book on visceral trauma. It's a mix of straightforward anatomy and complex surgical procedures, so I'm getting a lot of practice drawing hands and learning to distill busy photographs of surgeries in progress into simplified, understandable images.

SFARI

I was contacted by The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) to produce some illustrations for their website. So far I have painted four lab mice and one x chromosome.   It was nice to get back to traditional media after all of the digital work I did for the atlas.

Atlas of Surgical Techniques in Trauma

The first proofs of the Atlas of Surgical Techniques in Trauma came through, and it will be available for purchase in early 2015. I completed around 100 full-color medical illustrations for the project over the course of a year, and it is very satisfying to see it all coming together!

http://www.cambridge.org/de/academic/subjects/medicine/emergency-medicine/atlas-surgical-techniques-in-trauma

Here are a few illustrations from the book:

Medical Illustrations

I have started work on the 70-80 medical illustrations that will appear in an atlas of surgical techniques that my dad is writing. It will be published by Cambridge University Press, and it should be a really wonderful book! Next month I will see cadaver dissections, and the surgeons working on the book will demonstrate and explain the techniques to me so that I can illustrate them. For now, I am working on some of the anatomical illustrations that I can do based on reference images with the challenge of making them clearer and more accurate and somehow different from existing illustrations. 

This is a typical example of the initial notes that my dad prepares for me:

                                         

He finds illustrations which can act as good starting points. He then covers them completely in hieroglyphics, and I spend a long time deciphering their meaning and researching anatomy until I come to a rough sketch:

... which is then usually re-encrypted and sent back to me. From this I come up with the final illustration (pictured at the top). It is a fun process and I am learning a lot about anatomy. I initially thought it could improve my figure drawing, but I don't think the occasion will arise that I get to draw a model with a particularly prominent phrenic nerve. oh, well. I am enjoying the experimental process of mixing graphite and photoshop to seeing if I can get a clean look which doesn't feel too cold and digital.

I have a website now!

www.alexisdemetriades.com