NOVEMBER 14, 2016

In this project, we were given a prompt that began with "Dear Mr. President-Elect..." Our requirements were to finish the sentence, and then create a graphic that illustrated this.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to create something pertaining to equality, particularly that of women and other minorities. My original idea what to have a large crowd of people of varying races, genders, etc., and that above them would be the words, "HEAR US". However, after I got started on it, I scrapped the idea—having to draw all of those people would be a lot of work, and I didn't have much time to do it. Instead, I make the paper size smaller, and I also decided to focus the piece on just a few people. To start off with, I sketched out the people using a light pencil, making sure that everything looked proportionate before I finalized the lines with pen. After this was done, I finally added color. I went kind of backwards when painting, in that I painted the foreground before the background, but I don't think it's too apparent in the piece. I painted each of the people in the piece, painted the background red, and then went over the whole piece with watered-down black acrylic paint.

This was kind of a fun project. I'm admittedly pretty "passionate" (which sounds cheesy) about the rights of women, LGBT, POC, and other minorities, though I don't count as all of them. I wanted to be able to express that in this piece, hence the somber expressions of the people—minorities haven't achieved the equality that they deserve, and because of this I didn't want those in the picture to look happy. Other than that, I think that I did an okay job with the color scheme, and I'm glad that I decided to sort of darken the piece a bit, in the end. Before I added the black over the top, I felt that the piece didn't look like it really fit together—the colors weren't working together like I wanted to, and so I felt like I needed to add a unifying factor to the piece, which I'm glad worked out. I was kind of scared to be putting black, of all things, across the top of it, so it's relieving that it wasn't detrimental. In addition, I like the effect of the brushstrokes that I made with that top layer, and I think that my lines are rather strong. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how this piece turned out.