Tethered Feathers: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Elizabeth Jiang (2013)

I wrote my essay based on family. Based on this, the main metaphor I took out of it was how birds flocked to form a family and how they nest in close quarters. A bird is a powerful but overused metaphor that is easily represented in an illustration.

I chose to instead draw a kite, which is an indirect representation of a bird. In ways, birds and kites are similar, as they both tend to be colorful, they use the wind to guide their flights, and they can both be fragile. However, a kite differs from a bird in that it is grounded by strings so it cannot fly very far.