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Trapped In Melancholy: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Hasmik Galstyan (2017)

I am exploring the feeling of anguish through following your instincts.

I took the photo in my room in the afternoon. Since I was indoors, I got a bright lantern and placed it behind the bird so that the light hit it and defined its features. I had my background blurred out because I didn’t want the focus to be on the background but rather on the bird. Outside my window, there were trees in the background coming together and fade into the distance. I also needed to make sure that the window sill was visible just enough to show that the bird was behind a window and not just staring at a blurry sky.

I had a hard time at first figuring out what is something that related to “following your instincts.” The only thing I could think of at first were animals, but because we couldn’t use any real life creatures in our photos, I used a fake instead. Birds are free spirits that don’t like being trapped behind walls, or in this case, behind a window. To emphasize the anguish the bird was feeling, I drew blue veins moving up across the bird’s back to show that it was being consumed by the sadness that it can’t fly freely. The fact that the bird is fake in itself also brings out the anguish, because even if it knows that it’s not alive, it still wishes to fly freely, just like real birds.
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