Sixth Thoracic Vertebra and its accompanying challenges

This morning we had our second critique in Anatomical Visualization on a project that was deceptively complex. The task was to fit a mid-thoracic vertebra within a perfect cube in two-point perspective from an anterolateral viewpoint. We also had to make another drawing, this time of a transverse cross-section through our vertebra complete with the spinal cord and its meninges. My biggest challenge with this project was figuring out how to fit the vertebra within the two-point perspective cube. Conceptually, this might seem a little obvious… you just place the vertebra in a cube — right? Well, that’s an option, but you would have to construct this reference cube and align it perfectly with the preliminary drawing of the perfect cube in perspective. Knowing a little more about perspective after our class presentations, I realized that this could be an almost impossible task: lining up the horizon lines, understanding where a constructed cube would fit within the limits of the vanishing points, and figuring out how to keep the vertebra inside of the cube. Whew, that would certainly be difficult!

Thankfully, after hours of trial and error, I settled on a technique where traditional drawing and digital drawing would intersect. In illustrator, it was possible to construct a perfect cube in perspective and make some observational drawings of an each side of the thoracic vertebra. These drawings must be made on a flat plane (the sagittal, transverse, and frontal planes) so that they can be scanned and adjusted in photoshop to fit within each side of the cube. From that point, I made some guidelines linking the landmarks of the vertebra of each side with its corresponding side, each plane drawn in a different color. From there, I could get a good idea of where the shapes of the vertebra would sit in this space, and in this specific perspective.

T6 Vertebra with cross-section through the transverse plane

This took me over two days of consideration to figure out, so you can imagine how thrilled I was when it actually worked. Next, we have to draw the heart, and I’m so excited to get started. We will be working from actual human hearts from our cadavers, which I am curious about, since we haven’t done much sketching in the lab. More on that later!

• anatomical drawing
• anatomical illustration
• anatomy
• biomedical visualization
• bone
• meninges
• perfect cube
• spinal cord
• spine
• T6 Vertbra
• T6 vertebra
• thoracic vertebra
• two-point perspective