Even within the illustration community, which is itself often dissed by the fine arts world, medical illustration, like botanical illustration and architectural rendering, just doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Good medical illustration, to my eye, can be as exciting and visually fascinating as the most far out science fiction illustration or movie concept art and as bizarre and intriguing as the wildest surrealist imaginings. The striking thing about medical illustration when viewed in this light is to remember that it is essentially realism. It is realistic depictions of things that in many cases can’t be viewed with the unaided eye, but a form of realism nonetheless.

I’ve found medical illustration to be a vastly underappreciated branch of illustration, but I’ve always liked it. (I’ve even done a bit myself, in a way, in the form of the illustrations and Flash animation for The Interactive Body feature in the Gift of a Lifetime web documentary.)

Edmond Alexander and Cynthia Turner, who share a studio under the name of Alexander & Turner, have been notable names in the medical illustration field for over 20 years.

Alexander seems to specialize in envisioning biological processes at the cellular, and sometimes molecular, level (image above, left). He utilizes intense color relationships and dynamic contrasts of value to make the processes snap into clear relief in a way photomicrography can’t. The result can be dramatic compositions filled with fascinating forms, often intertwining in dramatic relationships.

Cynthia Turner works more often at the macroscopic level, portraying organs or other parts of the human body that need to be diagramatically sectioned or otherwise have elements accentuated, again in the service of making things clear and dramatic that would be difficult, if not impossible, with photography. Turner tends to work in a way that feels more traditionally illustrative, and I’m particularly fond of the illustrations in which she brings part of the painting or drawing to a high degree of finish and leaves other parts to blend out into the recognizable lines of the initial sketch (image above, right).

The Alexander and Turner site has short bios of each artist and a gallery of their work. Unfortunately, like many artists who have posted their images on the web, and particularly those in the field of medical illustration, Alexander and Turner have felt compelled to mar their larger images with watermarking, in the vain hope that it will somehow protect them from being swiped.

At the risk of being repetitive, I feel I have to point out again to artists on the web in general, that this will only protect images from the laziest of image swipers. If your work is in print, anyone with a $50 scanner can produce higher resolution files of your images that you will ever post on the web.

I tend not to feature artists on lines and colors whose web based work is watermarked, but I found some unblemished examples of Alexander and Turner’s paintings on the Medical Illustration Source Book site for you to enjoy.

When approaching medical illustrations as artworks, particularly those of microscopic terrains, try thinking of them as abstract at first, then let them resolve into realism. In the case of Turner’s work, look first at the drawings around the edges, in those images where where she has left them as part of the composition, and then move to the more rendered forms.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist who creates and illustrates “picture books“, which in his case usually means wonderfully bizarre and imaginative flights of fancy that look, at least at first, like somewhat dark children’s fantasy, but are often aimed at both younger and older readers.

He sometimes works with a writer, as in the award winning The Rabbits (image at left, bottom), written by John Marsden, and sometimes writes the stories himself, as in The Lost Thing (image at left, top), which is also a theatre production and in development as a short animated film (more information here).

Tan starts his paintings with thin layers of acrylic over white lines on a dark background, working from dark to light and continuing with oil for the final rendering. He also works in other media, including sctatchboard, pen and ink , pastel crayons, gouache and watercolor, collage, assemblage and digital media.

You can see the multi-media and assemblage techniques in many of his illustrations which employ a stratified and multi-planed approach, with areas broken into smaller images within a larger whole, unified by textures and patterns playing across their surface.

Tan also mixes design elements with more painterly areas, and also works in a more straightforward painterly approach at times, creating a fascinatingly varied array of work.

Tan’s books have been translated into multiple languages and have received book awards in several countries. Tan is also involved in other interesting projects, including murals, theatre productions and a children’s “Art Trail”.

Some of his books, like The Red Tree (image at left, middle), feature experimental narratives, or absence thereof, leaving the reader to wander amid the images and form their own narrative, almost like a Surrealist collage-novel.

Link and suggestion courtesy of Jesper Svedberg

[Update, 2011: See my more recent posts on Shaun Tan.]

As the Golden Age of Illustration waned in the middle of the 20th Century, and color photography became the dominant force in magazines and newspapers, illustration itself, along with the rest of the art world, went through some major shifts.

One of the pioneers of this changing landscape was Al Parker, an American illustrator and painter who got his break with a contest-winning illustration for a cover of House Beautiful. Parker would go on to make a career of creating dynamic, ground-breaking and precedent setting illustrations for magazines like Collier’s, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCalls, The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue.

Parker started out of the traditions of the Golden Age illustrators, but was soon moving into modern, and modernist, territory. Rendered forms gave way to more and more stylized abstractions of shapes. Flat areas of color replaced modeling and design came to the fore. Negative shapes, the areas in an image around and between objects, became prominent.

Parker became extremely popular and in demand. With packs of lesser illustrators nipping at his heels with imitations of his popular style, Parker kept changing his style, pushing into new territory and in the process defining mid-century modern illustration to a great degree. He once created every illustration for an entire issue of Cosmopolitan using different styles, and pen names, for each illustration. He was also influential on the generation of women who comprised a large part of his audience, making it a point to array his models in the latest fashions and helping to make those fashions part of the culture of the time.

I was surprised that I didn’t find more of Parker’s art readily available on the web, considering how influential he was on a generation of artists (he was also one of the founding members of the Famous Artists School), but I did find a few gems.

Paul Giambarba has come through, as always, with excellent illustrated posts about Parker on his terrific blog, 100 Years of Illustration and Design, with: Al Parker’s ads for American Airlines and Even more Great Al Parker Illos, and Leif Peng of Today’s Inspiration has an article about a illustrator Will Davis who had A Visit with Al Parker, and he has also posted a great Al Parker Flickr set and also has a page devoted to Al Parker on his site.

Addendum: The curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum was kind enough to leave a comment on this post to let us know that the museum will be holding a major exhibition of Al Parker’s work, “Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine 1940-1960” from June 9 to October 27, 2007.