Medicina Familie (Family Medicine) was, or maybe still is, a medical journal that my mother was involved with many years ago when we lived in Timişoara, Romania - the city where I was born. One of the doctors she worked with at the time heard about my ability to draw. One thing led to another and I ended up doing dozens of drawings and illustrations for them. I remember it got to a point where I had to say, enough is enough. I did enjoy doing it. I regret not keeping and asking for a final copy of everything I have done, but here are some of the artifacts I recently rediscovered.
I drew a lot of anti smoking illustrations for various articles and campaigns the journal was running at the time.
Smoking is a destructive time gamble…
One of the earlier sketches. The process was loosely like this…. I would be told or given a general direction or sometimes even other drawings and clippings, for inspiration, I would make a sketch, the magazine people would comment on it and then I would make a final drawing with ink/markers. Always pro-bono. Never made a dime doing this :).
A number of drawings assembled to work as a calendar illustration. This one was fun. I remember feeling it was going to be challenging, but given I was only 16/17 years old at the time, I think I did ok.
This ‘Tired Heart’ drawing was a recurring theme I drew many times. A few years later after I moved to the USA I even used this as one of the first vector illustrations I ever did, in Macromedia Freehand.
Doctors were always under a lot of pressure, always overworked and asked to do too many things at the same time. At least that’s what the article that this drawing published next to was saying.