My illustration represents a scene from my animation, for me the scene where Ana is creating the shadow puppets and the reasoning behind her actions. We were tasked to representing everything in the scene with symbols, so that everything in the illustration is representative of something else. In addition, we were required to use typography. As my animation doesn’t have and dialogue, I used sentences that I though Ana, my character, might be thinking , not saying. Using typography was a new challenge, and understanding and analyzing what messages different fonts can imply, just as artistic symbols do.

 

 

Artist Statement:

The scene drawn here is from my animation, Lights Out, about a girl who can’t sleep because of her bad dreams, so she creates shadow puppets to protect her. She uses her own light to make shadow puppet animals that fight off the bad dreams after she is forced to turn the lights off. She chooses to use her imagination to solve her problem rather than simply become scared.

The paintbrush with a sword hilt represents the girl; she uses the paintbrush in the illustration  as she does her hands in the story, to create something. The sword hilt is to show that what she’s creating is fighting for her like a soldier. The image she paints is a shield, representing the goal of her creations, to protect her. The paint stroke is orange, a contrasting color to the sad, grey blue of the background. The doodles of happy memories spiraling out of the paint are to show imagination, because this is the mind of a little girl. In addition to the doodles, the brush also paints words, written in a little girl’s handwriting, telling of her fear of the dark and the hope that the light, which she used to create her shadow puppets, will help her. Her bad dreams are shown with the murky dark monsters and spikes that surround her.