Hey, so I won an award at an art show this week. Think that might be worth sharing?
[ photo by Sam B. ]
I’m taking this digital drawing class this semester, and the first assignment required us to create an oversized piece. I decided before I started working on the piece that I wasn’t going to pay the money to print on an oversized piece of paper just because that was the requirement. I think that is wasteful of both my monetary resources and of our earth’s resources. Instead, I searched for alternative mediums. I knew that my piece was going to touch on emotions, but I wasn’t sure what I would focus on until I found the medium I on which would print the piece. I found Art of Where and saw that I could print on a scarf. I thought it would be interesting to make a piece about invisible illnesses and print it on something that you wear as a piece of fashion and literally wrap yourself in for others to see.
I decided to focus on anxiety, since I was experiencing it at a high level during the time I created this piece. I dealt with the idea of flight because anxiety (to me) tends to take off like a bird, plane, or — sometimes — a rocket, and eventually lets go and you land back where you should be. I created a linear storyline with these images and repeated some motifs that often show up in my own anxieties (gender issues, scheduling, relationship issues, etc.).
Here is the final piece. I flipped it on its side so you could see it better since it’s a wide piece. This is created from mixed media that I scanned in and manipulated in Photoshop using brushes. I call it “Wrapped in my Own Anxiety”.
I’m planning to create a series of invisible illness scarves. I’m open to ideas about which illnesses I should cover.
… oops … wrong year on the image. Should be 2014.
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Have you ever won an award for something? OR Do you have an invisible illness that you feel comfortable sharing?
