Donate Life Design

Artist's Statement:

The idea for this project was based on the prompt to create a positive and accurate message about organ and tissue donation. The prompt specifically said to used the phrase "organ and tissue donation".  I came up with the slogan "help life bloom", with the idea of using flowers as a positive message. I wanted the flowers to create a sunshiny effect, that would lighten the mood of what would otherwise be a grim subject. It was one of the criteria to be positive, so I didn't want to do any anatomically correct organs, so instead I did the stylized version, that also appears on your license if you chose to become an organ donor. I also added a check mark in a box inside the heart, along with the sub-caption "say YES to organ and tissue donation". The check mark shows that someone has said yes to organ an tissue donation, and so the flowers are blooming.

I used colored pencil for this project. I wanted to use acrylic, but I thought that would be too messy, and acrylic is always hard to take home, so I used colored pencil. I did my best to create a burnished look, and to have all the lines be clean. I had some trouble burnishing the background, just because there was so much space to cover. I used what I thought would be sunshiny colors: Red, Yellow, Green, and Orange.

In the end this project ended up looking a bit like an old timey advertisement. I really like that it turned out like that, because it reflects that the exigence behind this project was to create a positive message for something, which can be translated into advertising. It reminds me a bit of the Sun Maid logo/add, which uses a similar color scheme. I had some initial troubles with the colorscheme. I used some browns to sketch, and they ended showing up in the letters, making them too orange. I was able to erase them however, and redo them in red. I liked the red better, because with the orange it looked a bit too thanksgiving color palette, which was not what I was going for.