Brain Awareness Week 2025

I was contacted by GAMIAN Europe (who recently awarded me with a prize for my artwork 'Trepidation' which featured in their touring exhibition, 'The Vibrant Mind'), to ask if I would support their mental health initiative for Brain Awareness Week 10-17th March 2025.

Struggling for ideas I decided to go simple and draw a brain - but in the style of my watercolour splatter paintings. So, I found an image of a brain with strong shadow and light contrast and then drew the black line work, in a waterproof ink.

I had to put napkins down for the watercolours, since I am not at home (ie. can't use my studio) and I didn't want to trash the floor with this very messy painting technique.

I started off by adding large areas of intense watercolour splatters over the brain, and then used another napkin to dab it off, so that it didn't obscure the linework when it dried. Afterwards I added smaller splatter lines with a finer brush around the brain.

I'm pretty happy with how the resulting artwork turned out and will use it for a social media post. However, the colour balance is a bit off in the photo I took of the artwork and I don't have my scanner with me at the moment. I arrive home on Sunday 9th, so I will scan the artwork then and possible add some digital text to the image before sharing.