Rebound: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Andie Burns (2013)

The main inspiration for my illustration was the following idea from my personal essay: ''it’s important to let yourself be miserable when you need to be, because you can sense more of an improvement as you start to feel better than if you were to simply push the emotion down and pretend you weren’t hurting.''

My illustration uses the metaphor of a pogo stick to represent this. There are cracks in the road where it hits, which shows how you can achieve more upward power from pushing down harder. As the pogo stick bounces along the road, it leaves bigger and bigger cracks and bounces higher. In life, accepting the negative makes it possible to appreciate the positive even more.