PathSource - MEDICAL ILLUSTRATOR/SCULPTOR: The Merging Of Two Passions

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MEDICAL ILLUSTRATOR/SCULPTOR: The Merging Of Two Passions - Art and Science

About this video

Erica, a medical illustrator, spends her days sketching and designing anatomy models. Not only does she get to conceptualize the product, but now she is working on the business and manufacturing end as well. This is a job that has both creative as well as business and sales aspects.

Degree: Medical Illustration and Informatics - Pre-Medicine

Job Title: Medical Illustrator/Sculptor

Job Summary: Fine Artists, Including Painters, Sculptors, and Illustrators

Job Description

Craft and fine artists use a variety of materials and techniques to create art for sale and exhibition. Craft artists create handmade objects, such as pottery, glassware, textiles, or other objects that are designed to be functional. Fine artists, including painters, sculptors, and illustrators, create original works of art for their aesthetic value, rather than a functional one.

On-the-Job Training

Long-term on-the-job training

Additional Info

Some craft and fine artists learn on the job from more experienced artists. Others attend non-credit classes or workshops or take private lessons, which may be offered in artists’ studios or at community colleges, art centers, galleries, museums, or other art-related institutions.

Quick Facts

Average salary

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$20,000 - $60,000

Projected Job Growth

0 to 10 percent

Typical schedule

Part-time, Full-time, Flexible, Irregular, Varies Widely

Typical workplace

Remote, Outdoor, Indoor, Home

Personal Qualities

Detail oriented, Creativity, Artistic, Technical skills, People skills, Networking, Hand-eye coordination, Likes working with hands

Educational Path

Education Requirement

High school degree

Recommended Education Degree

High school degree
Bachelor's degree

Recommended Majors

Visual Arts
Fine Arts
Liberal Arts
Performing Arts
History
Literature
Social Sciences
English Language and Literature
Arts and Crafts

Related Careers

Archivists
Art Directors
Curators
Museum Technicians
and Conservators
Fashion Designers
Graphic Designers
Industrial Designers
Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers
Multimedia Artists and Animators
Photographers
Self-enrichment Teachers
Woodworkers

View Detailed Career Data

PathSource provides free English transcriptions for each of our informational interviews on video which will appear here after you have signed in. Our advanced transcriptions are highly interactive. They scroll down automatically as the video plays and users can jump to a specific part of the video by clicking on any word in the transcript.

For a small fee, we offer transcriptions in different languages, making PathSource a great tool for English Language Learners. This feature is currently available for customers in the education field only.

Please contact us at support@pathsoruce.com if you have any questions or would like to get a price quote for advanced transcripts offered in a second language.

P3.instances[0].transcript.parse_transcript_data({"transcript":"My name is Erica, and I'm a medical illustrator and actually, specifically, a medical sculptor. So I went to school as sort of pre-med to study medicine and anatomy, so parts of the body. I can show, for example, this is a skull. So I actually sculpted. I took bones of the human scull that I had on my desk, and I sculpted all the parts that we could make a mold and produce this 22-part skull that actually comes apart. I also do, for example, like a sculpture that you see over here, the head. So I'm actually doing the illustrations or the drawings of parts so that doctors can understand. So in all the textbooks you see or the illustrations or the drawings of the body. A typical day for me would be I'd walk into the office and maybe I would do some sketches of some system, maybe the stomach, to explain a disease of the stomach that you could have and sit down with a team. And we would talk about how to make this into a model or a 3D model. And then I use-- I used to use clay to sculpt and we would use that to make the mold. But now I do digital sculpting. So I use a computer program to help me sculpt the models. And then I would send the file away. And we would get a 3D print made of the stomach, and get it back, review it, and then eventually-- actually, I just moved back from China. I was living in China for a while because we have a factory there that uses the models, that makes the molds out of steel. And it's injection molded plastic. And that's how we make them. So what starts in my office as just a simple sculpture will then be thousands of them as we produce them in the factory. And so I was working in the factory to produce not just hard models but skin, like life like, like a stomach that you see here. So this is a stomach, for example, where the doctor can practice cutting the stomach or putting-- I think this is a gastric port-- so a feeding tube into the stomach. So he can practice on this soft, realistic kind of thing before doing it on a patient. When I was younger I really enjoyed drawing, but more very technical drawing, so detailed, kind of photographic drawing where I would draw from life and not so much with the painting, abstract painting. So I was very technical drawing. But I wasn't sure what kind of job you get if you're drawing. So then I was also interested in medicine or biology. And when I heard of the job called a medical illustrator where it's a marriage of those two types of skills, so you are doing the technical side of it, biology, learning medicine, but also drawing and having some artistic influence on the job as well. So when I found out about that, I said it's perfect. And then out of school, actually, it's a pretty good job actually because you can make a good amount of money doing it. I think most of the people that go to school for it-- there's only three programs in the country that I have it as a major, undergrad, and then you can go also for grad school. But I think the hiring rate is quite good. So where I am now, I started as a designer. And what I'm here at this conference doing is I'm actually selling the models. So I'm talking to people and setting up business agreements, trying to get purchase orders, and set up business deals. So even though I'm very happy that I went to school to learn this skill or the design capabilities, I wish that I had taken some business classes so that now I can apply that to the real world situation that I'm in. And I'm learning a lot about business on the job. But it would've been nice to have a little more of a background understanding how business deals work. ","file":{"id":255758,"video_id":"2700097061001","name":"69648219","duration":205162,"thumbnail_url":null}});