Blog

Over the past 2 days at uni, we were put into random pairs and given the task to respond to a word between the two of us and present final illustrations for it today (Friday).

Initially I thought this was going to go badly as both me and my partner have very different styles and approaches to doing work, and I don’t even think I have a set ‘style’ in this point in the course: I seem to try something different for every project!

Anyway, our word was ‘protection’ and we chose to interpret this through drugs: the protection people feel when they take more drugs and painkillers and thinking they’re ‘protecting’ their bodies but actually harming them and becoming addicted.

To combine our ‘styles’ of our work, I created some patterns and imagery of pills in vibrant colours using oil pastels, which we then scanned into photoshop and combined with my partners drawings of faces to create 3 portrait-like illustrations around this theme of false protection: the charcater slowly becoming more ill and less protected.

<b><i> Photo of the Patterns of pills which I contributed using oil pastel </b></i>

As seen in the photo above, the pills and colours encroach more and more into the actual face of the character representing the takeover of addiction. We were quite rushed in finishing this toward the end and near the deadline but overall I’m really happy with how these turned out! The print quality was a little dodgy on some but I think we bought our message across and we got many comments from other people. I’d definitely have liked to do this workshop again or maybe for longer so we could have refined and improved our illustrations even more. It was refreshing and exciting to do something totally different and work with someone new.