Pediatric Acute Care Heart Illustrations
About
The goal of this project was to make consistent illustrations for the cardiac chapter of Pediatric Acute Care, a book for teaching nurses about caring for pediatric patients. Not all illustrations are shown on this page
Media
Adobe Illustrator
Audience
Nursing Students
Client
Dr. Beth Bolick
Year
2025
Inspirations
PureRef was used to compile helpful heart illustrations and references for the project. Many different styles and formats of illustrations were collected to assure the accuracy of the illustrations. As the heart is a classic illustration, I found most of my references differed in rendering style instead of anatomy.
Top Row: Artist Unknown CC 4.0, SciePro, Cleveland Clinic
Middle Row: Coloringoo, Biorender, Shutterstock
Bottom Row: Stanford Health Care, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, Elsevier Complete Anatomy
Constructing a Solid Base
After a clean, flat vector style was chosen, Adobe Illustrator was used to create the hearts.
As this project required over 20 heart illustrations representing various diseases, I needed a solid, editable base to start. I made two main "base hearts,” one with the aorta and pulmonary artery and one without.
After the main shapes were done, I chose a soft, simple color palette to help reflect the pediatric nature of the textbook.
Creating the Defects
With the “normal” hearts done, it was time to start adding defects and, in some cases, repairs. I used Illustrator’s pathfinder and shape builder tools to easily add changes while keeping the same original shapes.
The base heart allowed me to keep the same silhouette throughout all of the defects, only changing when the defect required it. This calls attention to the differences and helps the viewer easily identify any abnormalities.
Purple was used to highlight areas where oxygenated and deoxygenated blood mixes.
All Images
