Unlike most others in his highly specialized profession, W. Branks Stewart does most of his medical illustration work with the air brush.
His success with this technique has been widely noticed and this week he has a guest — Russell Drake, head of the medical illustration department of the Mayo Clinic—here to look over his work and discuss his methods.
But the white-haired, good-natured head of Louisiana State University Medical School's art department disclaims any intention of starting anything new. STARTED BY ERROR
I got into it sort of by mis-
take, he said. "I had studied art
and when I decided to take up medical illustration, I looked at some samples of the work and decided they were done with the air brush, the tool many commercial artists use.
"So I bought an air brush and started out to learn the technique.
"It was only later that I learned that the illustrations I was imitating were actually done with crayons."
Medical art, Stewart and Drake agreed, keeps the illustrator concentrating on the new and the unusual in modern medical methods
