#scopelab

Special blog post by April Brust, SCOPE Creative:

My name is April Brust, a scientific animator and artist, and I had the great opportunity to work with SCOPE lab to create the site banner and branding artwork. It was truly an enjoyable experience to work so many influences together into something cohesive. Combining art with science and medicine is my motivation as a scientific visualizer so (considering the spirit with which SCOPE lab is founded) it was a seamless partnership!

Along the way I documented my progress work as both a means for self-reflection and to help explain my process to others who might be curious. The processes in these steps are those that I generally apply to all my projects.

Step 1: Define the constraints -- because the constraints inform the design.

Dr. Andrea Charise had a vision of a primarily monochromatic banner of figures which would welcome visitors to the site. To that end the characters in it had to be relatable and relevant to current healthcare experience, yet timeless to evoke the history of the humanities in medicine.

The endeavor was to find the essence of the figure through the deliberate minimalism of gesture studies. Layered dimensionality would be a plus, to suggest the multifaceted discipline that humanities in medicine encapsulates.

What I wanted to convey was dignity, diverse strength, and inclusiveness.

With this visual “problem” in mind, I set about to finding the solution.

Step 2: Create a style reference board

Nothing is created in a vacuum. Especially for this project, live models were not available and the feel of quick, from-life sketches would be a challenge to recreate. So I looked for examples -- not to copy, but to absorb the stylistic quirks inherent in fluent gesture drawings.

The best place to look is often at the work of old masters.

I will draw from these images as I do my first round of sketches. Observing the line quality, the texture, and the pattern-making of the reference images, I will make my own figures after their classic style.

Step 3: Create a figure reference board

To backwards engineer the models used in gesture drawings, I would also need a reference drawing that I would create myself. In this reference drawing, anatomy, perspective, and characterisation would be my chief concern. To achieve that, I gathered a figure reference board of useful poses from the internet. There was no getting the exact pose I wanted, but with these gathered images I can combine aspects of each to create a more realistic figure.

To not work directly from reference may seem a huge difference away from sketching gesture drawings at a live model session, but in a sense it is a natural extension of that exercise. The choice of what to leave out, what to push, what to exaggerate, what to minimize, these choices are made when drawing directly from reference, and in these choices artistry and style lies. Otherwise, take a picture, right?

In this project, my “live models” would be an unpushed and unfiltered drawing, leaving aspects of the gesture style for the next steps.

Steps 4, 5, and 6 are iterative drawing steps. They are not sequential and I go back and forth between them and let them inform each other.

Step 4: Master studies

I practice drawing directly from the master work, to emulate line quality and get a feel for composition energy.

Step 5: Original gesture studies of figures of interest

I apply this to new figures which I have designed to interact with each other.

Step 6: Composite

These figures have to fit together gracefully, so I edit stances as I go.

I keep in mind focal points using dynamic line angles to sweep the eye to where I want the viewer to look. At the same time I keep in mind the shapes the figures block out. The human body is organic and malleable, somany shape masses are possible. I take care to watch that the shapes I choose emphasize the movement and composition I am aiming for. Using such techniques as these I control what should be seen first as priority, and make sure there is a gradient of saliency, so the complex scene of 6 figures is not too busy or overwhelming.

Step 7: Feedback

Keeping a correspondence with Dr. Charise was essential to the outcome. The back and forth often brought up new ideas, and made sure the drawings always progressed towards the initial vision. Though it would send me back into the cycle of steps 4, 5, and 6, having feedback made the output stronger and more polished each time.

The final product is SCOPE lab’s logo and site artwork.

Andreas Vesalius