More Than Thorns: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Chiara Neyman (2012)

In this piece, I mean to depict my distrust of other people. Being so skeptical of people and situations can be entertaining at times--I am forced to see things through a bittersweet filter most don't automatically gravitate to. I create things in my head where they might not be in reality but sometimes what I create is trouble; often my lack of faith keeps people at a distance and distorts objects of potential beauty (such as a bouquet of flowers) into menacing items (like a bouquet of knives.)

To construct this piece, I traced over pieces of individual photographs in Adobe Illustrator and then stacked my images layer by layer to complete what you see here. Every color you see belongs to its own layer. There are a lot of them. While creating this piece I struggled to make everything realistic--at first the flatness of so many solid colors in sloppy shapes without texture really bothered me, but after awhile I began to appreciate the simplicity and highly stylized look of my Adobe creation. The knives were also troublesome I couldn't figure out how to give them the shine of a real blade--then Paige suggested using a gradient (thanks, man). I did and I think it adds a lot of depth to the piece.