Narrative in medical illustration

 Alongside my course I have been making illustrations for a forthcoming book about veterinary  anaesthesia. It’s a bit of a crazy thing to do, I work full time so its been tricky to fit everything in but it was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. It’s been going on for a while and most of the work I’ve been able to fit in at my own pace but the author of the local anaesthetic chapter took a long time to write it and to keep to schedule I created 19 original drawings in 9 days. It was good discipline to be asked to work so quickly without the quality suffering but it meant that I didn’t have time to be very innovative. 

The brachial plexus is a set of nerves that are tucked between the shoulder blade and the ribs. Conventional illustrations show the brachial plexus block from the side with the shoulder blade in the way. I wanted to try to view the nerves in the way that the person performing it would approach them. I believe that this is a byproduct of my experiments with narrative, telling the story of the approach and the procedure in one image. 

To be clear about the correct anatomy I talked to radiographers who run CT scans and are able to change them into computer generated 3D images to view onscreen. It’s amazing technology and for simple anatomy replaces the need for drawn illustrations but medical artists are needed to explain more complex information such as this. 

These are my sketchbook explorations of the site with my dog modelling the head.

I took a photo of her and drew the anatomy over using Procreate.

And tried various versions. The problem with the view is the foreshortening. The head helps to give it context but is either too big or too small. I need to part the ribs and the shoulder blade more than the are in real life so that the viewer can look through to the nerves.

This is a trial version with muted colour added to make sense of the anatomy but I’m still not happy with the perspective.

I made 3 subtly different versions leaving the head out:

The mottled blue area is the lungs and the all important nerves are in yellow, a convention I used throughout the project.

It’s close but still not right. I need to move the shoulder blade to the left to make the view clearer and it was going to take more time and experimentation to get right than I had available, either from the book project or for myself. 

After discussions with the chapter’s author, this is the image that will be used, for clarity the shoulder blade isn’t shown. It’s not as narrative as the version I want to create but I am saving that project for when I’ve finished my degree.