Donate Life

SUNRISE

JAN. 17, 2019 — digital illustration

For this project, we were tasked to create an image for the Maine Donate Life Poster Competition, which supports people registering as organ donors. The image had to include the words "organ and tissue donation" in some way.

I had a difficult time generating ideas for this project. I didn't really want to include my concentration of monsters, and I already drew flowers last year, so that basically exhausted my limited supply of things that I was able to draw well. However, after a lot of thinking, I settled on drawing a nature scene: mountains in the back, grass in the front, and the sun rising above the words "give someone another sunrise." It was cheesy, but it was something to turn in on the due date. After sketching out my idea on a piece of paper, I took a photo and used that sketch to draw a fleshed-out digital version. I was going to outline everything in black, as I usually did, but I found that it looked pretty bad; so, I decided to try something else. I didn't outline anything, instead using different brushes to create the lines and texture that I wanted to achieve. I spent awhile after that going back in and adding extra touches of color, as well as attempting to make the shading seem at least somewhat decent. Finally, I wrote out the words: "GIVE SOMEONE ANOTHER SUNRISE," and, beneath that, "consider organ and tissue donation."

I had a hard time with this project. It's the end of the quarter, so every single teacher is cramming as much as they can into these last few days, which meant that I didn't have a lot of time to spare for this assignment. As such, I feel as though it definitely would have been better should I have had more time to work on it and develop it, but it is what it is. I do like my composition, and although my "call to action" is a bit overdone, it works with the overall piece. I also had some fun with the fact that this piece isn't as detail-oriented as I usually try to make my work; it was a refreshing change, and I may try to develop this style more in the future. My major problem with this piece is the mountain-things in the back—I wanted them to be mountains, but I didn't want to make them brown and barren because that would be ugly, so I tried to use texture to make it look like they were covered in trees. However, that didn't really work out like I'd hoped, and it mostly just looks like weirdly shaped green lumps, or mossy rocks, or something other than what it's supposed to be. In spite of that, I'm proud of the outcome of the texture in the grass, and I also like the sky and clouds in the back.