The Anatomy and Physiology of Fitness

Fitness and sports take up a big chunk of my seventeen year old life. As a college bound student athlete, going to the gym and practicing my sport are important to me. What fascinates me the most is how my body works together to allow me to execute. The anatomy and physiology of the human body is absolutely amazing; our bodies have over 650 muscles and 206 bones, attached by ligaments, tendons and protected by cartilage. All of these parts work in unison to allow our bodies to do millions of things, and my passion for learning about the human body is shown through this project, using Adobe Illustrator.

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This first piece is a page that consists of strictly fills in black, grey, and white tones. The focal point of the theme is the three runners in the middle. The original picture, that is now a silhouette in the middle of the page, was the progression from the skeletal system, the muscular and skeletal systems together, and finally the entire human body with all systems in tact. I thought adding the mosaic tile fill in the background would help to move the viewer's eye across the page. The smaller runners in the camo-like pattern and their shadows were a last minute add-in; I felt that the silhouettes alone were not enough to make the piece interesting, so I decided to take the actual picture and add a fill to it, with a shadow for depth. My inspiration for this piece is the unity of the body; the bones depend on the muscles and the muscles depend on the bone in order to work properly. All of the systems are needed to move, and shown in the piece is running. Since running is my least favorite exercise, the smaller runners are camouflage since I believe anyone who has a passion for running is a true trooper.
You go girl.





This second piece was my favorite piece to craft, since it involves color. Working in black and white for a majority of the project was not as entertaining, but with color the possibilities are endless. My original idea was to show the progression, once again, of the skeletal system, to the muscular system, to the whole body. The last picture has a similar emphasis to this one, with the idea that the body is a system with many parts that allow us to move. However, in this picture it shows the individual parts and shown at the bottom is the parts all working together. My focal point of the image is the woman flexing in the dead center, she is larger than the other images which makes her stand out. This image relates to my theme, The Anatomy and Physiology of Fitness, because it shows the anatomy, "What is it?" and the physiology, "What does it do?" as well as the fitness aspect.






The focus of the third page is split between the bottom half with the woman leg pressing and motivational quote, and the top with the lines drawing attention to the dumbbells where the lines intersect. This is the fitness focused page, since it only includes fitness equipment and working out as the theme. My main goal was to make an interesting picture with image tracing and lines that followed my theme. This page was the simplest page for me to make because I duplicated and image traced weight room equipment and added lines of various opacities and thicknesses that overlap.






 Finally this last piece was creatively, the most challenging piece to make. How can I illustrate the anatomy and physiology of fitness through patterns? Well, I decided to take photos of muscular and skeletal tissues under a microscope and collage them together to make an abstract pattern. To give it some depth I took the image and made it larger and more opaque as it gets farther away, and more focused and smaller when it gets to the front. To give some kind of hint as to what it is the viewer, I assed an image trace of the human skeleton and muscular systems, hoping to give the viewer some clue. This was the most difficult and unclear piece of my collection.

This is the front view of the book fully assembled. I wanted to keep a clear and simple cover to compliment the complexity of my piece.








This is the inside of the book, fully assembled. I wanted to break up the black and white scale, by putting the colored piece between them. I'm really glad how my first project came out, but I learned what TO do and what NOT TO do for next time.








~r.h.