Donate Life Design

Artist Statement

For this piece I designed a Donate Life poster encouraging people to consider organ and tissue donation with a sailing themed message. The message is "be the wind in someone else's sails, consider organ and tissue donation." I wanted to include the idea of organ donation in a positive way so I added a heart on the sail and on the person sailing the boat. For reference pictures of sailboats I used some I had taken on my phone to get an idea of the basic structure of a sailboat.

I made this drawing digitally using Procreate on my iPad. I had done this project digitally in the past and I like that it gives me the ability to experiment with the text on top of the drawing. I started with a thumbnail sketch in my sketchbook and then recreated that digitally using the dry ink brush. Then I turned down the opacity of that layer and used thinner, clearer lines on another layer on top. I added details as I went and made adjustments to the boat. I then colored in the environment around the boat and changed some of the lines to dark greens and blues rather than just black. Then I added some reflections and highlights to the water to give it more texture. Then I colored the boat and wrote out the words. I made the word "wind" more slanted as a way to include the font in the theme.

My changing the line colors I was experimenting with a new way of doing digital art because I don't usually do that extra step and I think it looks a little better that way. I also experimented with a way of including the text by having the words at the bottom be on buoys floating in front of the sailboat but I got rid of that because it looked too crowded. My project evolved as I made changes to the text, added details to the water, and figured out what I wanted the sailboat to look like. My next steps could be to try making other changes to my process when creating digital art.