Natalie Vestin

“Heart 360” is a personal illustration project I completed in the spring and summer of 2014. My goal was to draw the human heart every day for 120 days and make two digital versions of each sketch for 360 hearts in total.

I had several reasons for doing this, the strongest being that I wanted to do it and thought it would be fun. I worked for a cardiology consultant during grad school and learned so much about the heart and became scared of so much about the heart. I fell in love with it, saw violence done to it, and wanted to save it. I wanted to learn it with my hand and my eyes, sketch the fear of my own benign arrhythmia out onto the paper, make it beautiful or known in different ways.

The sketches below, even the digital renditions, are raw. If you wanted to be romantic about it, you could say they’re all broken in their own ways. Stray line marks, heavy indentations, maybe a fingerprint or two. I like them that way. Some are anatomically correct, some are decidedly not. Some have arteries and veins. Some have howling dogs and flowers and spiders. Others are your standard decorative hearts. And they’re all mine, and they’re all for you.

2014, ink on paper