Sometimes when I'm looking for new ideas for an illustration, I ask a friend to throw me a subject as a starting point. One idea that was given to me was the subject of masks, which seemed interesting and was something I hadn't explored before. I then went to the library and looked at a whole lot of books on masks. Mexican, Japanese and African masks appealed to me the most for inspiration. Around the same time, I'd been hearing a lot about the lizard brain and the concept kind of crept into my process and the mask idea evolved into a lizard brain idea.