USD Magazine Spring 2008

a hobby that lets her learn more and share her passion with others. It also lets her make contacts she otherwise might not have made. The locale for all this blogging is an apartment that befits a hip artist, with portraits she painted of friends hanging on her walls, a model skeleton leg resting casual- ly in a corner, the bones of an arm draped around a plant on a table. Sitting at her drafting table with her tools of choice — a charcoal pencil and sketch pad, a laptop for blogging and refining illustrations in Photoshop — Ruiz presents a soft-spoken, calming presence. She cut her teeth with years of scientific illustrations of the inner workings of the Pacific tuna crab —“very tedious”— as she earned her USD biology degree. Michel Boudrias, associate pro- fessor in the Marine & Environ- mental Studies Department, rec- ognized her artistic talent and asked if she’d given any thought to who drew the illustrations in her text books. She hadn’t. “I actually have some of Vanes- sa’s artwork here on my desk,” Boudrias says now.“She is phe- nomenal, absolutely phenomenal.” He put her in touch with another former student in the field, and Ruiz found her passion. “It was hard to get information on it, because there wasn’t much on the Internet at all about it,” she says. Once settled in her master’s program, the blog became a way to help others avoid the frustration she’d faced in trying to learn more about the esoteric field. She’d love to become an art director after graduate school, maybe at a pharmaceutical adver- tising agency. For now, Ruiz takes pride in the blog and enjoys the connections it helps her forge. “I’m still a grad student, not an expert in the field,” Ruiz says. “But it’s making people aware of our profession. It’s exciting.”

VANESSA RUIZ

he’s become something of an ambassador for medical illustrators, yet her career is S UNDERNEATH I T A L L M e d i c a l i l l u s t r a t i o n + p o p c u l t u r e = We b l o g by Kelly Knufken [ o f f b e a t ]

a foot still clad for summer with a nail in it. (“Clearly the flip-flop could not be removed for the X- ray. Despite the ouch factor, this is a beautiful X-ray.”) Another entry highlights the work of an artist who envisioned what Bugs Bunny’s skeleton might look like, then created it. And her post on anatomical tattoos got a lot of attention from online denizens. It’s clear medical illustration is a passion. And the blog —“It’s always on my mind,” she says — is

track to earn a master of sci- ence in biomedical visualization in May from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her blog may feature an inter- viewwith an artist or an interest- ing piece she’s seen. The intersec- tion of medical illustration and pop culture—and especially advertis- ing— figures prominently. Ruiz delights in — well, maybe delights isn’t quite the word — but takes interest in unusual X-rays, like one showing

in its nascency. Vanessa Ruiz’s blog, dubbed “Street Anatomy,” fills a void when it comes to imparting information on her chosen pro- fession. In fact, it now attracts some 1,500 people a day, with 390 regular subscribers, including medical illustrators and doctors. “They love it because nobody else has done it yet,” says Ruiz, on

Read Vanessa Ruiz’s blog at www.streetanatomy.com/blog.

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USD MAGAZINE