THE LIGHT FROM WITHIN

The week before last was our department's superfantastic Armitage Lecture series. The event is held annually in honor of Frank Armitage, the incredible Disney Imagineer who did the set designs for The Fantastic Voyage. And Frank himself comes every year!

This year's special guest speaker was David Bolinsky, the guy who did the Inner Life of a Cell animation... but several speakers gave pretty inspirational talks-- mostly about medical animation. (Last year, the theme was apparently mural-painting and 3D mummy imaging.)

(also: here are some photos of the events of the day, taken by the lovely Sara Egner.)

Common themes that I heard (other people's interpretations may vary):
1. You really need to be an ambitious mover-and-shaker to be successful in this industry.
2. Networking is crucial.
3. It's cool to make medical art that doesn't look like people's perceptions of what medical art oughta look like.

Now, our third assignment for surgical illustration class was to create an editorial journal cover dealing with some aspect of a surgery we'd watched. After watching a vocal cord surgery, I found a recent article depicting a Transventricular Chondroplastic Laryngotomy... which I won't get into here (endolarynxes, thyroid lamina, blah blah blah). But part of what makes the surgery cool is that they light it with an endoscopic light, which makes the outside glow. The photos are copyrighted, but trust me, it's nifty.

Initially, when I got this assignment, I really wanted to do a retro-looking vector image (like this), but I was considering throwing in the towel and doing something a little more conventionally rendered and medical-illustration-looking.

After hearing all the Armitage speakers and all their talk of following your dreams, my initial impulse won out. I had a load of fun making this, and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!

Rock on, Armitage guests. Rock on.



[Adobe Illustrator]