Donate Life 2

Anna Labbe

Organs Don't Fossilize

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

This is my submission for the Donate Life project this year. The prompt was to make a project that would convince/influence a teen viewer to check the box on their Maine ID/license that ensures that they would donate their organs if anything were to happen to them. The setting of my piece is a fossil dig, or fossils buried in the sand that have recently been uncovered. A big thing for me was that I wanted to keep this project within my concentration and really challenge myself to come up with a creative and unique idea for it, rather than just drawing a heart and having that be my project. I wanted it to represent a theme that I enjoy and that is important to me, so I related it to archaeology and paleontology. I initially had a hard time coming up with a slogan and actually relating the fossils to organs, until I realized that organs can't be fossils, and that could be my whole message, that your organs don't fossilize and renew like you do, and that they can go on to help someone else since they will no longer be able to be a part of you.

I made this project by first drawing out my design, the words and the ornithomimus skeleton, and then drawing the little raised land in between since most fossils are found in divots of land. I realized that they didn't really look raised, however, so I added some contour lines that made the raised land look more raised. I then outlined it in black pen because I thought that I would be using watercolor, but then I realized that it would look more clean and solid and clear if I didn't use watercolor paint, since it is very washy. I decided to use colored pencils, which was challenging because it took a long time to color around the words and mix browns and reds and beiges to make a nice terracotta shade, but it eventually worked out well and I like how it turned out.