The brain.
I’ve always thought brains reminded me of walnuts (or rather, walnuts reminded me of brains) and so I draw the whole corpus callosum (a) in the shape of a walnut (in Schmincke’s walnut brown I might add). A bit of a stylised brain. A logobrain. Because I can. Because that’s my background. That’s who I am. That’s what you call “artistic license”.
Today I searched for pictures of brains. It wasn’t that easy to find a picture of a real human brain. Or rather, it wasn’t that easy to find a picture of a real human brain that wasn’t discoloured due to being stuck in some preservation fluid for years on end.
It turns out (from what I could discern with a brief online search with google) that the cerebellum (B) and the cerebrum (A) are approximately the same colour.
Despite that, I still paint my cerebellums darker than the cerebrums (these days). Mainly because I’ve been doing it that way for months already and I’m not changing my style now.
In case you are wondering, I usually paint the brains naples yellow (probably because that’s how they look after they’ve been sitting in preservation fluid for years on end. Almost colourless, but yellowish. I paint the cerebellum gray titanium. Well, sometimes the brain is called “grey matter” isn’t it? I feel the grey colour* has to be represented somewhere!
Lately I have been painting the cerebellum stripes at a different angle (as it is almost looks like a danger zone that way if you must know), and leaving it plain white to give the artworks more negative space and hence contrast overall.
I think my brains look better this way. There is more contrast. Perhaps if you ask a neurosurgeon (one that is cluey about colours) they might even be a slightly different colour? They do have different types of cells to the rest of the brain after all… it wouldn’t surprise me.
What I did find was that I wasn’t drawing the brain stem (which includes the pons, the midbrain and the medulla oblongata). So I might start including them in my depictions of brains in future. I think it’ll be more recognisable as a brain, and that’s what I want.
* Or maybe it is white matter?
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