Percipient's Perspective: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Sheila Ahi (2012)

The illustration is depicting the doors of opportunity, colored diversely to emphasize that each way differs from one another. My imagination tapped into my childhood memories of watching Alice in Wonderland, specifically the scene where she was surrounded by a plethora of doors. My plan then changed, due to my want of a more abstract background, rather than limiting the illustration to a single hallway. I did not face any risks when making it, since I could just undo any mistake I made, therefore I had more leeway to try new things or retract them. The piece has a common theme of a sort of vine-like design creeping over each door, though in different forms. It indicates that there is a continuous negativity that exists– something that will always be there, no matter what door is chosen.

In order to create the illustration, I used Adobe Illustrator CS6. The background was an outcome of me playing around with the gradient tool. The doors, however, were traced from an actual picture of a door, as well as the placement of the doorknob. The pen tool was handy, since, while it traced, would make the fill of the door the color I desired, and the doorknob black. A challenged I faced with Illustrator was when using the pencil tool to create the black vines, since I always had to make sure I was on the same layer of the door that I had created, prior. Organization helps was a key lesson that I learned when making the picture, since it made it much easier to find layers that I wanted to work on.