Book Jacket Artist Statement
Sean had never really achieved anything in life. He was always the butt of all the jokes, he had very little academic achievement and no control over what was to come of his life. He would always walk around school, slouched over, head constantly inspecting the ground, dressed in the same hoodie he has worn for the past few months as well as his superman pajama pants he got when he turned 13. No one really knew of him, he was just one of those nobodies that people referred to as a loner. The only thing he had ever been good at was skateboarding, and he wish to pursue this passion for the rest of his life. He never really made an effort to talk to anyone, unless it was his best friend counterpart, Alex. Alex was the complete opposite of Sean: popular, outgoing, highly intelligent, and a very optimistic view on life. They had been friends since kindergarten, and thus they’ve been through pretty much everything together. However, while Sean was swinging alone on the swingset, Alex was bench pressing cute girls on the playground. When Sean was rejected from the football team, Alex was the team captain and carrier. Alex knew that Sean had always wanted to be apart of the popular crowd, so he figured it was finally time to invite him to a party.
When they arrive at the party, everyone begins to take a liking to Sean! Sean begins to realize there actually is a happy and social side to him that he’s never seen before. However, things seemed to take a turn for the worse when Chad stepped out into the party and began to criticize the skateboarding skills of Sean. After Sean claimed to be as good as he felt he was, Chad challenged him by daring him to go down the steepest hill in their city, just outside the house. Without hesitation, Sean decided to accept the dare. Now Sean and Alex are standing at the top of the hill, they’ve looked after each other for all their life and it was up to each other to stop one another from doing anything stupid. Alex failed to convince Sean otherwise, and as Sean stepped onto the board to begin his trek down the hill, he realized that he had made quite possibly the greatest mistake of his life.
Surrealism Artist Statement
Have you ever been on a long road trip, where you're constantly bickering with your sister and your parents are constantly arguing? Then when everything seems like it can’t get any worse, you break apart from all the arguing and look out the window. There’s a lot of things that catch your attention as you stare through the glass, but nothing attracts your attention more than the phone lines that seem to expand in contract with every foot you drive. It begins to look like a rollercoaster the more you stare at the inanimate string and you begin to wonder what it would be like if a superhero were to be running alongside of you. Your imagination begins to run wild as you imagine all the different situations that this phone pole could be involved in. Instinctively, you put your hand up to the window and began to pretend that your fingers are a runner’s legs. You start slowly, picking up speed as the car accelerates. You keep running along the phone line, but you start to realize that your fake character is constantly running into the actual phone poles. Making this realization, you begin to jump over the phone pulls as you run along the line. Eventually you work up the courage to jump on the cars, going from a small jump to the small cars into a big jump for the larger cars. Finally, your car comes to a stop and you skid yourself to a halt.
This is the message I was attempting to portray in this photo. At the time of a beautiful sunset, I shot a picture of five different times during the sunset that I put together using an HDR preset. Finally, an even more beautiful picture came about, and I noticed how familiar the phone lines looked, as I remember gliding across them with my fingers every time we came back from long road trip. Then I shot a few variations of my hand and edited them into a PNG file where I placed that on the original background. I then edited my hand variations so that they seemed to walk along the line. After doing a final edit of the photo, I was very pleased with the result as it brought me back to my childhood.
In Design, we were asked to create a book jacket that would wrap around our story we created in English. The purpose of the book jacket is to briefly explain the excitement and summary of the book without giving away the ending, while aiding the viewer as to what the scenery would look like by using hand drawn pictures of pivotal moments in our story. Additionally, we were asked to make it look extra real by including a bar tag in the bottom left section of the back cover, a price tag, and a bio of the artist, ourselves. In my story, there was a moment when Sean was standing at the top of the steep hill with a skateboard in hand, staring down the large slope that was ahead of him. Realizing this was the most crucial part of my story, I decided to make this the cover of my book, a young man staring down an insanely sloped mountain road. On the back of my book, drew out what the resolution would look like as if the timeline of the story could be told simply by seeing the imagery from front to back.
