Liver, labelled

First textbook illustration image complete!

Some explanation may be in order. This is a liver. It is an inferior view, which doesn't mean it's not a great view, it means that it's flipped up and you are looking at the underside. If you rotated this out of your screen so that the round end (the fundus) of the gallbladder was facing you, that's how the liver would appear in someone standing in front of you facing you (which is the anatomical norm). That's why the "right lobe" is on the left of the screen. The medium is carbon dust, which I mentioned previously. It was more challenging than I thought to get the proper effect, but I'd like to try it again with more informed expectations on how the medium responds. I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out, but it's nothing compared to a lot of the stunning works by my classmates. I scanned it, brought it into photoshop, tweaked the levels, erased out the surrounding data, placed it in illustrator, and added the labels.

I'm looking forward to doing a lot more in illustrator; it seems like a pretty powerful program and I'm just starting to explore the more basic uses. I actually managed to troubleshoot an annoying issue I was having, which is always satisfying. In the process I found this funny comment: "This seems to be over-designed. Why isn't painting here as simple and creative as painting in photoshop?" ... uhhh... it's not photoshop. It's not a painting program. That's why there's photoshop and illustrator.

Also, this week I got some upgrades for my computer. Reminds me of that classic Matrix line... "Upgrades." Yeah, anyway. Now I gots me some 12GB RAM, and a backup HDD that's actually the same size as my data drive, so it won't overfill like it's been threatening to. Don't know if you remember this fun post: http://biocinematics.blogspot.com/2010/05/changing-hard-drive.html, but this time, I managed to switch out a hard drive without completely disassembling the entire computer. It was still a pain, since you can't bring the HDD through the front of the case, and the cables created a really tight space but much more manageable than last time. Installing the RAM was a breeze. Six sticks of RAM in a computer makes me geek out, can't help it.

Oh yeah, and as I was messing around inside the computer, it sunk home just how close I was to having a pile of debris instead of a functional computer after this: http://biocinematics.blogspot.com/2011/08/moving-in.html. I didn't take any more pictures because it's hard to get a true perspective on it, but once you start thinking "this is supposed to line up with that" or "that piece of steel should be behind that piece of steel" it gets pretty funny. Seriously laughable (you can use that oxymoron sometime, it's a free one). Parts of the motherboard chassis are literally 1-2 cm out of alignment. Parts of it... not the whole thing... so I don't know where the stress is going. It struck me that the case must have acted as a helmet, absorbing the brunt of whatever insane shock the system got. *sigh* I'm hoping that survival = survival, and not a shortened lifespan of certain components.

Well, I should get back to studying. As much as I enjoy the illustration parts of the program so far (especially finally getting to do some digital stuff, as simple as it looks), the vast majority of my time is required by anatomy. Got an embryology exam on Tues and the second bellringer a couple weeks after that, so I really gotta get stuck into it (I think that's a British expression?).

Notice I put the image at the top so people who don't like reading can just look and leave. How considerate.

Later,
Stuart