Turning Psychology into arts

I would say that choosing the topic for my personal project wasn’t that difficult to begin with. I knew immediately that I was going to choose something associated with arts since it has been my passion ever since I was little. I loved all things that had to do with it, examples being music, performing arts, and so much more. Though there were a variety of categories that I could possibly choose from, I have settled with painting since it was the thing that really got me into arts in the first place. Alongside arts, psychology has been something that I have been willing to learn more about ever since I was around 12 years old. I simply loved learning about how the human mind works and it never fails to fascinate me. So with this personal project of mine, I have decided to learn more in depth about psychology while interpreting it through something that I love and have passion for. I will be focusing specifically on three mental illnesses: ADHD, Bipolar Disorder and Eating Disorder. Not only because I was most interested to learn about it, but also due to the fact that I myself have been diagnosed with 2 of the disorders mentioned. My aim for this project is to have a thorough understanding of the mental illnesses mentioned, and interpreting my own ideas on it into a painting. With this, not only do I get to improve my creativity and thinking skills, but I could also possibly help myself, and others that are facing something similar to it.

Product Goal

As mentioned before, I will be doing a painting for my personal project. As advised by my supervisor as well, I will be adding elements such as symbols; an example of this being a green ribbon, as it represents mental health. It took me a while to think about what type of painting that I want to do, but I settled on three blank human-like figures staring into mirrors where their reflections represent the mental illnesses that I am doing research on, which are ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Eating Disorder. My personal goal for my painting is that it has to not only look aesthetically pleasing, but for other people to really see and feel the emotions interpreted through it.

Reflection

When I started planning my project, I felt as though I wouldn’t encounter much trouble executing the actual learning process and actually creating the product due to how both arts and psychology is something that I am both passionate and familiar with. But even in the beginning of my research, I had soon realized that my prediction in regards to my project might not be correct. It may seem easy to research the information through the internet, but making sure every single website and source that I will be using is a factual and accurate depiction of the disorders is not necessarily the easiest thing. Adding to the fact that my initial plan of basing a big part of my research on a psychology book, but it did not really cover the elements that I wanted to find.

That was one of the many obstacles that I had to face, but one of the other major impacts that I had realized whilst working on my project was how mentally draining it was to learn in much detail about how the human mind works for certain disorders; in a sense where I sometimes would reflect greatly on myself and realize more about the problems I wouldn’t normally think much about on my day to day basis due to what I was learning. But in the end, I would say that it is pretty worth all the drainage since I get to help and be more aware of what I should say and how I should act around the people surrounding me. Now for the product of my project, is a painting. I do have to say that this is probably more challenging than my research part, but at the same time I found myself enjoying it more.

It wasn’t really the easiest thing to find an original idea for my overall painting concept, and it took me a total of 3 sketches for me to finally end up with one that I am genuinely happy with. From the start, I had planned to incorporate a lot of symbolizations, which was probably why I was struggling when making it. I also painted the whole painting with only primary colors, which was pretty time consuming but at the same time it is very advantageable due to how I was able to customize the colors to my liking. I also noticed myself being more motivated to do the painting rather than the whole psychology research itself, in a sense where I found the whole process to be very therapeutic and I get to test my own creativity level along the way.

Product Evaluation

My final product is a person in the center with a variety of backgrounds with elements; the one on the left representing ADHD, the center being Eating Disorder, and the right representing Bipolar Disorder. I would say that I portrayed all three of the disorders very well, as it had reached my own personal goal and visualization I had from the start of the project. For the ADHD illustration, I had drawn objects that did not correlate with each other, to signify the inability for one’s individual to focus on a particular thing when dealing with this disorder. The outer space background also resembles how restless it could be to have endless thoughts that are way beyond one’s control.

The eating disorder I had strategically drew in the center of the work, and taking up a majority of the spot in the art work, since I also wanted to give a piece of me in my artwork. Since eating disorder is something that had taken up my mind and is now something that I would have to deal with for a majority of my life, I wanted to significantly incorporate that into my art piece. I had drawn a person’s torso with a measuring tape wrapping around it, alongside a gigantic fork and a scale on the sides of it to showcase how much control things such as numbers and even daily necessities such as food could have on a person dealing with this disorder.

For the Bipolar section, I drew two similar masks with drastically different expressions, to symbolize how much a person could change in a short period of time. I also wanted to make anyone who sees it feel the overall mood I was trying to portray, thus why I chose the colors red and yellow, since they are the colors everyone would pursue as the color of anger and happiness. Though there are a lot of expressions an individual can deal with when dealing with this disorder, I had chosen the contrast between joy and anger since that is the alter between emotions that could be most difficult to deal with (according to a diagnosed patient). And lastly, the center piece I had drawn to be a figure of a person, that I had purposely left uncolored to symbolize how even when it seems like an individual has nothing wrong going on, could actually be dealing with a whole lot more than what people may portray them as. I am very pleased with how my work turned out, since it not only had reached my level of standards but I felt like it had a good message that I wanted to voice out through my painting.