Stanford Medicine Magazine, Fall 2017

I had the pleasure of working on an editorial piece for Stanford Medical magazine. The article is about a surgeon who created a way to use a patient's own tissue to repair an aortic valve. It was my task to educate readers about the general anatomy of the heart and where the aortic valve is.

The link to the full Fall 2017 edition is here.

It was a relatively simple process - Sketch phase with minor revisions and an approval stage from the surgeon before creating the vector and painted art. One of the challenging parts of this illustration was how to show the liquid blood entering the valve.

Another major challenge of this project was how do we show the viewer all of the heart's anatomy as well as single-out the aorta on a half-page illustration. I tried a few ideas, one being to separate the pulmonary valve from the aortic valve. I still think this is a cool idea, but not practical for its end use.

There are many times when internal anatomical structures of the body have their parallels in the outside world. A bell pepper bottom for instance is a great representation of a tricuspid valve which is exactly the form of an aortic valve. Using the pepper as photo ref then helps me to get my lighting and shadows right when I go to digitally paint it.