Digital art: “Blue”

This time for Creativity I decided to indulge in one of my favorite passtimes, drawing! As a child, putting colors and shapes onto paper enabled me with a portal to another dimension full of vibrancy and awe – a satisfying retreat from the real world. As most childhood things do, my delight for drawing dulled more over time; deadlines and summatives replaced the smell of fresh paper and pencil. However, the boredom of quarantine provided me with the perfect opportunity to rekindle my love for drawing, and with the discovery of digital art, I’ve been striving more than ever before to improve my inner artist.

The picture above is what I had completed this time, it had been a week or two since I drew – DP 1 was simply taking up too much of my time, therefore, this was an extremely welcome break. What spurred me into action was to create this drawing with the urge to illustrate my feelings as I draw. I wanted more than anything to convey my emotions of being inspired, and for the color palette to function in setting how I feel that atmosphere would be. I believe that I was quite successful in my utilization of colors and shapes with the purpose of conveying impression and tone to my audience. Exercising this device in everything I do would be a good decision as it would be extremely helpful in the aspect of communication in the real world, therefore, mastering it in different contexts can be highly useful. I am most proud of my drawing of the background, this is generally a part that takes a long time for me and does not always turn out how I want – so the clear progress from my previous art/ backgrounds made me rather content to observe. Taking this into consideration, I can affirm that after the creation of this art, my strengths were definitely the use of colors as a tone indicator and the composition of the artwork’s background. Below is a picture of before the overlaying colors.

Elaborating more on the title of my artwork – “Blue” – this was a reference to the manga/ anime Blue Period, which focuses on the protagonist’s journey as an artist. The protagonist has a sudden moment of inspiration early on when observing Shibuya in a blue light that that sparks his artistic influence. I wanted to portray my own “Blue” moment, inspired by Blue Period.

Below shows the lineart for my artwork.

Initially, I had wanted to relate more to my long-term creativity goals and implement mental health issues into my artwork more. I had planned to do this utilizing color, potentially with darker colors on one side of the drawing to infer negative emotions. The scenery outside the window would be much brighter with warmer colors – to show inspiration and in order to symbolize the “light outside the tunnel”; exercising my color theory skills. However, I did not have the confidence to incorporate these techniques to the fullest extent and instead went with a safer route. I believe this was a weakness that I had come across, and think that improving on self-confidence in these aspects would benefit me immensely. Next time I decide to take a challenge (in anything, even things outside of art), I want to go through with my plans despite the fear of failure.

I believe that next time I decide to do an artwork for CAS, I would like to take up a challenge and infuse an abundance of mental-health-related symbolism/ techniques. In relation to my CAS journey as a whole, I think that in order to balance my CAS I would like to immerse myself in an Action activity.

Learning outcomes:

• LO1 – Identify your own strengths and develop areas for personal growth.
  • I think that this time I spent doing art really opened my eyes to my capabilities and shortcomings in relation to digital art. Therefore, I was able to strongly grasp my strengths and what I should improve on. 
  • I was able to set a goal/ challenge for myself that will spur me to work on the areas in which I am rather lacking. 

• LO2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
  • I definitely did challenge myself, and I believe I refined my background skills during the creation of this artwork. I look forward to improving this more as I go on.

• LO3 – Demonstrate taking initiative and planning
  • Interconnected with the first learning outcome, I think that I was able to fulfill this one by planning ahead what I would do for my next artwork and taking initiative in how that would impact my work.
  • I think that the end of my blog post was also able to fulfill this learning outcome through the planning of what potential CAS activities I could do next.