Abyss: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Daniel Kammerer (2013)

My narrative illustration is of a tornado of greed and desire for material goods, raging and obliterating my better senses. I was aiming to depict my eternal want for more things, how there are always electronics, games, or other media that there's an urge to be satisfied. This greed tends to blow away certain attributes that are good in a person, which I've shown with typography. Lightning raging in the background is symbolic of my inner conflict between my rationality, telling me not to waste my time and money wanting things, and my consumerist side that seeks the satisfaction of receiving. I created this piece in Illustrator CS6. I mostly used the blob brush tool. With it I was able to replicate clouds and a tornado of various values, which created an illusion of depth. The lightning in the background was made using a reference image, and the pen tool. I downloaded the typeface, Blocked, typed in each word, then split them so that I could rearrange them into a more chaotic pattern in order to show that they were being blown away. I took advantage of layers in Illustrator during this project more than any other piece, which was necessary due to the various cloud layers I was working with.