I have had the image of a heart in my head for a few days, and I finally got around to putting it on paper. I looked at a few heart pictures a week or so ago, but, when it came time to do the drawing, I used no reference. I wasn’t going for a realistic heart so much as an interesting one. I played around a lot with the arteries (is that the proper term?) all over the surface of the heart, doing the bottom section first, then the top-left, and finally the top-right. I experimented and drew each section differently.
The initial shape was designed to very loosely resemble a typical valentine-style heart. Then I roughed it up and drew all the blood vessels. I spent a bit of time really adding some darkness to the drawing, since many of mine end up a dull gray, and I think that helped give it more depth. I actually thought a bit about how this heart would work (e.g., the arteries on the top-right section are bringing oxygenated blood to the top-left to keep it pumping), but I didn’t worry about practicality too much. In fact, I’m not sure if this is a three-chambered heart or four. I guess someone will have to slice it open to find out….
Ian,
I think you have gone about this heart sketch the right way. There are the abstract versions, e.g. valentine cards. And there are realistic versions, photographs, scans, etc.
But the truth is that every heart is different and the real heart in the chest does not line up all that well with the standard versions, even actual photographs.
Back in 1998 when the surgeon found that my left descending artery was more than 99 percent blocked, he also found that my body had made its own bypass so nothing further was needed at that time.
In 1994 my cardiologist decided a bypass would be good because things were working not quite up to 100 percent so that each time there was critical stress there would be a little degrading because not all of the heart would get what it needed. This would over time become worse and worse.
So I had that new minimally invasive cardiac artery bypass surgery… robotic arms and cameras. The surgeon didn’t even put bandages over the incision points. He said that they had moved my heart closer to the center of my body during the surgery. It was something new they were trying. When they are not splitting your chest open, they can spend more time deciding exactly what to do new. They used the mammary gland artery. Of course I think you only have two of those.
Keep up the good work, Ian.
Robert
I was recently talking to someone about hearts and started to think about how much they do and how little we acknowledge them until something goes wrong. It’s amazing how much medical science has advanced and yet how limited it is in some ways. I still think it’s interesting that we have to take so much blood to check for various infections, imbalances, etc., yet we can do many surgeries with no more damage than what a needle would cause.