Medical Art Project Details
The project brief was the creation of over 160 medical illustrations to be printed into two patient education guides. One guide to be focused on illustrating how to prevent osteoporosis, the other one illustrating treatment for osteoporosis.
Patient Information Guides
The guides were to be used as doctor to patient education guides to be distributed across European countries and translated into three different languages. The project needed to be delivered within a specific deadline and the medical illustrations had to complement the written content within the guides.
Commissioned by Swiss based company, Daiichi Sankyo (Schweiz) AG, the project brief included not only the requirement for detailed anatomical illustrations but also the need to illustrate lifestyle medical illustrations to describe aspects of nutrition, healthy living, weight control, exercise in order to focus on the education of patients in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.
Osteoporosis Medical Illustrations
A consistency of style was required to be used across all of the medical illustrations, diagrams and lifestyle illustrations. We chose to use digital painting and air brush method in order to maintain the colour scheme across all of the medical illustrations so they matched, to data information to illustrations and to create graphs.
Originally sketched out in pencil the illustrations were reviewed by the client for approval before being created in a full colour format.
There was a good working relationship between the team at Medical-Artist.com and Daiichi Sankyo with good feedback and even additional illustrations being added to the project along the way.
The background of the medical information to be illustrated was to show the direct relationship between the lack of estrogen after the menopause which can result in osteoporosis. The target audience therefore was woman of a menopausal age. Osteoporosis which is a progressive systemic skeletal disease and is characterised by reduced bone mass and density and micro-architectural deterioration of bone tissue increasing the risk of sudden and unexpected fractures caused by the osteoporosis.
The series of medical illustrations also needed to tell a visual story for the description and management of the bone disease. Sectioned into two parts the guides were to visually describe osteoporosis therapy, as well as osteoporosis treatment. The illustrations needed to be both descriptive, informative and depict the ageing of a woman, an older woman of a menopausal age with her internal anatomy, and woman having treatment. The illustrations of internal key anatomy needed to demonstrate how and why estrogen is lost due to the menopause and what happens to the body when estrogen is lost. The patient education included how fractures can occur for example, to describe bone loss and the hormonal changes. Illustrations on the treatment side visually described how management of diet, exercise and even how hormone therapy treatment can help reduce or prevent osteoporosis giving a complete guide to the patient care of the disease.
Clients comments from Daiichi Sankyo
“We have now received the new folder with your illustrations: I love it!”
Lisa Ruckstuhl – Product Manager Osteoporosis, Daiichi Sankyo (Schweiz) AG
