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

Exploded Cell Phone

This is an exploded view of a cell phone that I completed for The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for an upcoming exhibit entitled "The Natural History of the Cell Phone". I had initially begun the project with digital renderings, but Dr. Bell at the museum requested that I switch to watercolor to emphasize the often-overlooked handmade nature of high-tech objects.

 It was an unusual experience to sit down with something as modern as a cell phone and to approach it as though it was some sort of zoological or botanical specimen- from dissection to traditional representation of its parts. As I have no background in modern technology whatsoever, I felt a little bit naive in my approach, possibly as some of the early European scientific illustrators might have felt when drawing African animals for the first time.

These are the first in a series of cell phone portraits for the same exhibit illustrating various members of the cell phone family.

Here is a link to The Smithsonian's blog page about the exhibit:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/03/coming-soon-a-natural-history-of-the-cell-phone/

Exploded Sago Palm (Meteroxylon sagu)

This piece is for The Smithsonian, illustrating the many useful parts of the Sago palm. It has been made into a poster for children in Papua New Guinea! 

Trophy Head- Watercolor

This was the last piece I did at The Smithsonian. It was collected during the 1929 sugarcane expedition to Papua New Guinea. It is human skin stretched over an armature of clay, and it was smoked and decorated with paint, shell, bone, and bound up the back with basket weaving. It was considered to represent ideal human form, or the form that humans secretly possess. I was excited to paint it, because I had ordered the 1929 National Geographic, which has a long article about this expedition, and there is an image of this exact head in it, so I really felt like I got to play a part in the history of this object.

Procedural Skills Curriculum Illustrations

 For The Keck School of Medicine's Procedural Skills Curriculum booklet