Opioid & Pain Digital Collage
This custom graphic for the Scherrer Lab at UNC Chapel Hill collages two significant panels from their recently published paper in Nature. The collage is designed for easy screen-printing and printing on unconventional materials. These were printed on shirts and holographic stickers.
Process
Research: The Scherrer Lab studies the neurobiology of Opioids and pain, using a multidisciplinary approach. Their most recently published in-house paper in Nature describes the neurobiological mechanisms of placebo pain relief, using techniques such as calcium imaging and the Placebo Analgesia Conditioning (PAC) behavioral assay. I drew from a Calcium imaging panel that describes data of the former, and a heat map that describes data the latter. I isolated the panels in photoshop and made them monotone and high-quality. I also created a stylized image of a poppy, representing opioids, by processing a picture of a flower through several photoshop adjustment layers. Additional shapes and texts were achieve in illustrator.
Building blocks
Figure 2 of the Neural Circuit Basis of Placebo Pain Relief
Adding texture and monotone.
Inspiration
Screen-printed book covers from the 1960s, Classic band T-shirts, and my favorite science journal cover art of all time: August 1971 issue of Science, Vol. 173, no. 3997, sound spectrogram of the "song" of a humpback whale.
