My PSA portrays a miserable looking girl, with blood-like tears streaming down her face. Her hands are folded over her stomach, where a Dahlia flower is resting. The dahlia flower has vines coming out of it poking parts of her body hard enough to cause blood. This is supposed to represent invisible disabilities, as other than the flower and her facial expression, she looks completely fine. But the flower is there inside her causing pain and distress. Her hands are folded over the flower, keeping it partially hidden to emphasize its “invisibility”. I specifically chose to do a Dahlia flower due to how darker dahlias often symbolize pain. For the color scheme, I went with fully blues and some blueish purples for the girl, because of how those colors represent melancholy and sadness. For the blood and the dahlia, I went with a dark magenta to create a contrast, and also since that color is close to the red of blood while still being in the range of my color palette. The background is the same color as the dahlia so that it is tied together with the drawing of the girl.
To make it, first, I sketched out a rough draft of the girl‘s body in Illustrator. Then, I went back with the pen tool to fill it in with color and smoothen it. I then made one petal of the dahlia flower, before copying it multiple times and placing all the petals together to make up the flower. The hardest part for me was probably drawing her hair. I first drew the outline of the hair in a lighter color, before highlighting the flow of the curls in a darker color to give them more volume.
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