Alzheimer’s comic

And now for something completely different (and fun!)

Patient education strip showing a couple’s reaction to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis

Flash

Exciting news – I’m starting a new job with a company downtown to create animations in Flash for the purpose of patient education. This is something I’m really excited to be doing; I’m happy to be not going the pharma route. Although I do respect and still enjoy projects that part of the industry, I feel more fulfilled working on the patient/medical education side of things.

I wanted to share my “audition” piece I did for the job; I’m pretty happy with how it came out, and excited to be doing more!

Humidifier from Laura Schwartz on Vimeo.

And in a similar vein, here is a (very) quick piece I did also in Flash, just for fun.

 

Painting with an iPad

A few weeks ago I joined the masses and bought an iPad. I got it pretty much for client work and as a way to show my illustration and animation portfolio around. Anyway, I heard through the AMI about this awesome app called Procreate, and I had to share. It’s essentially a miniature version of photoshop for the iPad, you can swap out brushes and textures, mix colors, work in layers, and play with flow, opacity, and line weight just like in photoshop. Returning to my all-time favorite topic of sea otters, this is my first painting using the app…I didn’t spend too long on it, it was more of an exercise, but I was excited to have done this basically just with finger paints.

Responsive Web Design

I’ve recently begun working on a website redesign for a client with great ideas for an amazing product for medical education, but now feels that his site is in need of a facelift. With all the crazy things we can do with web nowadays, and our ability to view a website just about anywhere, it has become incredibly important to have a website with a responsive design. I say this feeling like a hypocrite, since my website is NOT like this, but hey, I’m working on it. Another hot thing in web design now is also the use of horizontal/vertical sliders – I am a huge fan of this look, and think it makes everything so much cleaner, but it can be difficult to organize into a responsive site.

Anyway, I found these links and tools that I found very helpful when creating my initial wireframes, and thought I’d share:

http://www.netmagazine.com/features/50-fantastic-tools-responsive-web-design [tons of neat tools, the link below is a pullout from this site]

http://www.thismanslife.co.uk/projects/lab/responsivewireframes/ [ experiment with how layouts are altered as the screen size changes]

http://onepagetheme.com/applying-responsive-layout-to-one-page-websites/ [ the link pretty much says it all ]

Upper Brain/Hippocampus

I think my favorite piece of anatomy ever is the pes hippocampus. I remember seeing them in neuroanatomy dissection after carefully cutting through the temporal lobe and seeing these cute little toes.

I was getting rusty on my Maya modeling, so for now am skipping ZBrush to build at least the basics in here. Not all of the anatomy is there yet/size relationships are off for the time being, but here at least is the beginning of the mesencephalon and the hippocampus. I want to get the entire limbic system constructed; it’d be a good modeling/sculpting challenge! And potentially useful for future projects.

Pes hippocampi!

Sizing still needs to be adjusted….

Looks like an alien, right?

Art a Day

I’ve been a little slow on the blog updates lately; I’m doing some web coding work that, frankly, isn’t too fitting to post here. However, because I want to stay motivated to draw and sketch in the meantime, some coworkers and friends have joined me a in daily draw activity that we’ve begun to post on a tumblr blog (sorry, WordPress).

A lot of it has been more conceptual, but I’ve managed to squeeze in some scientific content into the word prompt regardless, which has been fun. I’ve found that having a random daily prompt has helped to keep the creative juices flowing and inspire me on current and potential projects in my personal business!

Some scientific-themed illustrations that have popped out of this…

Rosacea

This is an old piece from my internship that I realized I never posted on…so here it is! This I think got lost in the shuffle of graduation and vacation, but here it is now. I think this might have been my favorite piece to work on during my internship, and it was fun to have my mom model for me (and she actually does have rosacea).

To learn more about the condition itself, visit the Rosacea Patient Page that this piece was created for!

Surgical treatment for CHF

One of the projects I completed last month was a small illustration series demonstrating a surgical treatment method for congestive heart failure (CHF). CHF is a condition where the heart is essentially unable to effectively pump blood to all parts of the body anymore. If your heart can’t push happy, oxygen-rich blood to limbs, organs, etc, there can be a buildup of fluid in those areas. Obviously, this is not ideal. This condition is typically long-onset; it doesn’t often just happen overnight. It can come about from disease, high blood pressure, or alcohol abuse, among other things. Treatment is pretty varied; it can be managed through simple lifestyle adjustments, medication, all the way up to surgery with a ventricular assist device (a mechanical pump that is inserted to help pump blood through the body).

I created three illustrations for this – the first shows the full setup; the arterial interface device (AID) connects in at the subclavian artery, which connects down to the balloon pump that sits in the aorta. The balloon is inflated/deflated to increase/decrease arterial pressure by the outer driver, which the patient can carry like a satchel. The driver can be connected by the patient at the skin interface device, which connects the entire pumping system. This device is also where electrodes are connected, so that heart rate etc can be monitored. The surgical illustrations show the initial steps of the surgery, where the graft housing the AID is sutured into place (top) and the final placement of the AID in the graft (bottom).

The turnaround on this project was incredibly fast (a little less than one week), so I didn’t get to develop the illustrations as much as I may have liked to given unlimited time (ha), but I think they still came out nice and clean, and more importantly, show what needs to be shown. For the system illustration, I decided to let the sketch mostly carry the image of the figure with minimal color, since the focus was on the system anyway. I kept the sketch in the illustrations, and layered color over that (just about the same style I worked in when I interned at the American Medical Assocation). Overall, a great quick project that made for a really nice break from animating!

AMI “Illuminate”

I just got back from this year’s AMI Conference in Toronto, and it was pretty exciting. I didn’t got to any of the workshops, but I think seeing the speakers alone was pretty awesome. Some highlights of the conference:

- E.O. Wilson and Gael McGill presenting their comprehensive new iBook textbook for high school students. After their talk I had the chance to talk to E.O. Wilson AND get my picture with him. Completely starstruck in the presence of essentially the father of modern ecology. 

- Bryan Christie discussing his process and showing some of his work – he did the amazing hand series that was in National Geographic a few months back.

- James Gurney, illustrator/author of Dinotopia discussing how he approaches drawing what can’t be seen

- Learning about new programs that can populate a cell matrix, create dynamics for molecular binding, and to make DNA origami!

It was an inspiring and intimidating conference; I’m excited to try out some of the tips and new software I’ve learned about these past few days. 

Body plans and stem cells

Been a while since I updated… I’ve been working on two very different animations since I got my shiny new degree – one is on Body Plan evolution, and the other on stem cell migration. The body plan project was in conjunction with fellow BVIS grad Suman Kasturia – we split it so I did the research/storyboarding and she did the Flash animation. It will accompany a book publication eventually, but I’m excited to say the project is complete(!) I won’t share the animation here, but here’s some of the images used to create it:

The other project I’ve been working on is a 3D animation for stem cell migration. We’re going through major editing of it right now – there is a flat, relatively static animation, and now I’m reworking it so it’s much more dynamic and visually interesting. Below is just a screen shot of the reworked, inside the blood vessel before the cells pop out. It’s on the dark side, I’ve turned off final gather to speed up rendering and need to adjust my lights to account for that.