Medical Illustration

These two paintings/illustrations - also in oil - are companions to the one posted yesterday. The bottom painting is actually my daughter's eye. I needed one for the illustration, so I used her as a model. The top portion is really the interior of the eye. Along the back of the retina, there are these rod and cone shaped objects. When light passes through your eye, it strikes these cones and rods. The cones pick up the color. As humans, we are trichromatic creatures. Tri, meaning 3, and chromatic, or chroma, meaning color - Red, Green & Blue. Humans cannot see the color yellow or purple. When light passes through your eye, it strikes these rods and cones, causing them to vibrate. When your eye detects something as being yellow, the red rods and the green rods vibrate and overlap, giving us the illusion that we're seeing the color yellow. The same goes for the color purple.