Penetrating the Blood Brain Barrier

“Penetrating the Blood Brain Barrier” deals with crossing certain boundaries. The blood brain barrier is what keeps all kinds of nasty things in your blood from entering your cerebrospinal fluid, which is the stuff your brain floats in. It started out as one of those cliche sort of abstract composition where there are just a bunch of shapes that intersect each other and then the colors change at the places where the shapes overlap, like a Venn digram except not so much about showing the logical relationships between different things.

This painting started out as a pastel drawing which I mostly painted over with acrylics, then going back in and rubbing some pastel dust over the still kind of wet acrylic paint to get the nicely contrasted brushstroke effects like the blues and whites on the far left.