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.