The Microbiome Super Highway

For mental health awareness month, I got to write and illustrate an article on Cooking Light about the connection between our gut-brain axis and mental health. The gut microbiome does a lot more than just handle digestion…there’s so much we don’t know yet, but the nascent field of nutritional psychiatry hopes to figure things out.

I played around with seamless patterns and line work to create this header in Adobe Illustrator–the backgrounds of blue and orange are handpainted gouache textures, while the patterns inside the brain and gut illustration are turing patterns originally made in photoshop and exported to illustrator. My editor picked the final orange version, but I quite like the various blue versions I created.

Read: https://www.cookinglight.com/eating-smart/gut-brain-connection-for-mental-health