Medical Illustration
Illustrating with a Wacom pen combines the tactile feel and control of traditional media with all the benefits of a digital workflow.
Benefits of Digital Creation for Medical Imaging
- Digital workflow mimics a traditional artistic experience
- Faster design iterations
- Share designs more quickly
- More realistic renderings
- Improved communications through markup and annotation
- Reduce paper, scanning, tracing and cleanup
-Illustrations courtesy of Mike de la Flor
Use case
Medical illustrator’s are often tasked with the challenge of creating artwork that is visually pleasing as well as being medically and scientifically accurate. The primary challenge is to take highly technical content and transform it into a clear, concise visual story that explains and teaches. The resulting artwork, animations and storyboards are used by medical and health professionals, researchers, advertising agencies, pharmaceutical companies, personal injury lawyers and the general public. As classically trained artists, the traditional tools and material of a paper based workflow are often very familiar. Wacom pen displays and graphics tablets allow the medical illustrator to enjoy the benefits of a digital workflow in a way that preserves the freedom and tactile feedback of traditional art media. The pressure sensitivity of a Wacom pen provides the same variation in line thickness or opacity as the illustrator would expect with ink, pencil, or pigment on paper. Using the pen directly on the Cintiq screen is the closest way to create precise digital art while using a freeform traditional process.
(image of Mike de la Flor working on a Cintiq 24HD courtesy of Christina Sizemore)
Recommended Wacom Products
Cintiq 24HD
Combines Wacom’s highest performance pen technology with a large format 24” widescreen display so that medical illustrators work directly on screen to draw, sketch, scale, and render in a digital format in the most natural way possible.
Cintiq 24HD touch
Provides all the benefits of Cintiq 24HD, but adds multi-touch to allow medical illustrators to get "hands-on" by incorporating gestures on-screen. The Cintiq 24HD touch also offers stellar color performance - delivering a 97% Adobe RGB color gamut and over one billion colors.
Cintiq 22HD
Combines Wacom's pen technology with a 22" widescreen display, letting medical illustrators draw directly on the screen for fast, natural, precise digital creation.
Intuos5 Touch
Professional graphics tablets in either medium or large size are an alternative way to add pressure-sensitive cursor control to any computer for the medical illustration process.
Recommended Software for Medical Illustration