Donate Life Design

Artist Statement

The main idea of “Be like a Dragon; Protect, Give, Love” is to encourage people to consider organ and tissue donation. While creating it, I thought about the message I would want to give, if I were needing organ or tissue donation. I came up with the conclusion that I would want people to do three things, and know that by donating, they were doing these three things. These 3 things are Protecting, Giving, and Loving. The title is inspired by a moment in my process of creating it, where I saw a dragon in the piece and decided that I would take a risk, and make the dragon come to life on the page. Somehow, I needed to incorporate the dragon into what I was doing, and so the title emerged. As far as the message goes, Organ and Tissue Donation is very important. I can save lives, and that is exactly the problem I struggled with while making this. I agree with the importance of organ donation, and I am sure that if it were one of my family members in need, I would probably do all I could. My question comes in at: when do I let life take its course, and understand that not everyone will live and when do I say, no I need to save that person’s life? If there were a person drowning, I would do all I could to save them, so doesn’t it carry over to donating organs? I do not know the answer, but I do know that I will be answering the question at some point. Returning to the piece, a part of my message was to show that these “beasts” called dragons (who I consider mysterious and not beasts) would also donate life. I wanted to give the idea that everyone could donate, no matter who they are or perceived to be.

The materials that I used while making this work was watercolor and acrylic paints, and a ballpoint pen. The ballpoint pen was used for the writing. At first, I used only watercolor and thought that that was all I would use. But as I continued, I really started to like the idea of using acrylic, which is a little stronger of a paint. I used watercolor at first because it made the texture that I was looking for. Only watercolor can create what looks like water spills on paper, and that was part of what I wanted. The acrylic is much stronger and doesn’t react as much to water, which was important to me that they not mix. This was made on watercolor paper that was 9 inches by 12 inches.

Work on this project began with me watching the video encouraging teens to donate life. From here I made two different design sketches, of what I planned to do. My first one was a candle, lighting up the darkness, and my second was a flower, whose petals were falling to the ground, but whose root came from a heart. Neither of these designs really ended up in my end work. Next, I started working on the project, with the idea in my mind that I would do a simple watercolor wash with dark colors, and then figure out what I would do. Once I completed the wash, the painting was left for a day, to dry, and for inspiration to come. My step-father was the one that pointed out this subtle shape in the clouds that I had created, that resembled a heart. I also saw this, and I kept seeing a dragon in the clouds. Taking a risk, I painted the dragon that I saw there, using some of the excess paint from another project. All of the colors that I used for the dragon and heart had already been used in another project, but I really didn’t want to waste them, so I used them here. Once I had painted the heart and Dragon, and they had dried, I put my message on it. I also added one more little note at the bottom of the heart. It says: “Let someone Live.” That seemed like a message that pretty much summed up the whole project.