The Use of Scientific Instruments in The Exploration of The View Plane in Drawing |Biomedgrid

During the years of practice as a scientific illustrator - often dealing with setting up scenes that require a microscopic, extremely local point of view – I have had been required to employ specialist viewing facilities and instruments in order to study the close-up, microscopic field in which important but extremely small-scale events take place. Such events may be at the molecular, microscopic and micro-organism level. This has often required the use of specialist viewing instruments; sometimes using very narrow fields of visible light: at other times functioning in the x-ray, ultra-sound and electron based realm. Whilst such use of specialist, close-up viewing is very often seen as performing a supportive function in allowing for the visual scrutiny of microscopic events and the tiny but critical protagonists involved in those events at that scale, and the aesthetic qualities of the finished illustrative artwork are assessed within a more usual, human eyesight configuration - that is with cones of vision, focus and field coverage more readily associated with un-aided human observation – it is noticeable that the microscopic and close-up aspects of specialist instrument viewing have aesthetic qualities of their own.