Donate Life

The main idea behind this project was the donate life campaign and the idea that organ and tissue donation can save someone's life or drastically change it for the better. I have some personal quarrels with the concept of dog "rescue" in a lot of cases, but I realize that the average person is not affected by those issues or thoughts so I thought this might be a good direction to take this project in because most people will take it for its intended meaning even if I don't entirely agree with the concept of how I phrased it. I also just wanted to draw my dog again in a different style and material so I was happy to somewhat compromise in order to do so.

I used a very basic outline on sketch paper for the start of this project, but instead of doing my usual style of doing something relatively realistic I instead tried something a little closer to how the digital portraits we did looked with more solid blocks of colour arranged into a recognizable shape. I wasn't entirely sure going into it how I wanted to achieve the look, but I decided to use brush tipped markers because I liked the way they allowed for more solid sections of colour without showing as many brush strokes, plus they had a good variety of colours. Once I had the colour done on paper, I transferred the image of that into photoshop, removed the background and replaced it with solid white so it looked cleaner, and added digital text. I prefer the look of the solid white backing and the digital text because I think it makes the whole thing look a lot cleaner and nicer to look at.

I had absolutely no plan for the text going into it, I just knew what image I felt like creating. I didn't even know what the text was going to be until the afternoon I had to turn it in, at which point the actual work had been finished for days. I practiced the actual image in graphite a couple of times on other paper to play with the location and size of each block of colour, and once I had a sketch I liked and had it transferred onto the final paper, I kept the sketch to test colours in for each section to see how they would look on the final piece. I also went over a couple things and changed them even on the actual final work because I decided I didn't like the way I had done them and liked them better changed. Overall there were a lot of things that I tried and changed throughout but I like the way it came out in the end I think.