Day 1- Anatomy Art

Today was Day 1 of the Anatomy Art project we’ll be completing this summer. Rebecca Kruse and I will be the Summer Student Researchers starting the project under Dr. Goldina and Mrs. Costa Ouimet. Dr. Goldina offers extra credit to both her Anatomy I and Anatomy II classes if they make an art project based on human anatomy. These pieces are to be displayed in collections and the subjects utilized for lesson plans. The object of mine and Rebecca’s research is to explore how “anatomy presents itself in daily life through physical and digital art platforms,” by creating a digital website to use as both a digital collection to display the pieces, but also to serve as an educational resource to learn about the artwork, the science behind the art, and how to use what you learned in an educational setting.

 Today Rebecca and I met with the faculty mentors to start planning the project. For our first week goals the four of us determined that the main focus areas include picking the website, determining the selection criteria for the pieces, starting the blog posts, and starting software and equipment training. Rebecca and I had also never officially met before, so it was interesting to meet the person I’ll be closely working with and then jump straight into planning. Pretty quickly Rebecca and I decided to use Wix to create the website because of how easy to use it is. We have very little experience creating an involved, aesthetically pleasing website and on Wix it is very easy to add whatever page elements suit your needs and format said elements to fit your theme. For example, we want to add these blogs posts onto the website, and on Wix there is an ‘add’ button where we could pick and choose to add videos, pictures, a blog section, buttons, a database, or even social media links. We decided to pick a template and edit it to fit our project needs, though we could have chosen to start from scratch if we wanted to.

Once we decided on Wix and on a template, we started to form the shell of the site with sections and tabs we need, as well as decide on site color schemes. We also managed to decide which pieces we are focusing on first, as we want to fully research, document, and upload pieces rather than documenting 100 pieces and not uploading anything to the site. Because the artwork is based in Anatomy, we wanted to classify pieces by system (ie. skeletal, cardiovascular, etc.), and start documenting pieces that represent the different systems to cover the variety of systems Dr. Goldina’s students have chosen to illustrate.

Personally after meeting Rebecca, meeting with Dr. Goldina and Mrs. Costa Ouimet, and working with Rebecca all day I’m really excited for how well this project can end up being based on the ideas we had and the enthusiasm we have for the project.

Tune in tomorrow for Rebecca’s first update!

-Aubrey Mitchell

Etown ’20

Day 1 Research: Kruse (left) and Mitchell (right) choosing which website to use and formatting the list of student pieces to be displayed on the website.