The Global Context I chose for my personal project is Personal and Cultural Expression; as I want to showcase my artistic representations of women’s rights issues that occur within our cultures and community and share them to raise awareness. I hope that in raising awareness I can help people to reflect on these issues and their own responses to similar situations. Throughout this personal process journey, I have learnt and developed various skills such as watercolor painting, communication, and empathy.

Research was a crucial component for the achievement of my product, as all of the paintings I created were based on real-life situations that I researched beforehand. Though I had an understanding of gender equality issues, research was required to broaden the scope of that understanding and to ensure that the information/situations that I based my paintings on were realistic and relevant. While researching information on websites helped me to check the factual accuracy of my current understanding, it was watching videos and documentaries that helped the most. I watched many videos and documentaries, one being about child marriages in India, that really helped me to empathize with the women in the documentaries, and helped me to understand their perspectives and the problems that they face.

As this was an art-based project, creative thinking definitely came in handy in the art creation process. Using creative thinking, I connected the ideas and facts that I had learnt over my research and came up with an idea I would draw on paper that would represent these experiences that people go through. All of the ideas that I came up with were inspired by the documentaries I watched, and personal experience; what I faced and what I have seen other women in my life face. Creative thinking was also used outside of coming up with ideas for paintings and during the painting themselves, as I would have to choose which techniques I think would have the most visual and meaningful impact.