Little too Late: A Junior Conceptual Project by Thomas Hoke (2014)

For my experimental project, I am exploring the feeling of remorse for an accident. I expressed this statement through a metaphor for accidental neglect. The man walking away is a highly successful business executive who is ridden with remorseful as a result of spending too much time working and not enough with his family. Eventually, it was too late and alas, the ferris wheel was abandoned much like he abandoned his kids. Although his intentions were pure, his work obsessed lifestyle consumed his life, accidentally excluding his personal life from it. On the ground, a ferris wheel car lies broken symbolizing the unkept promises he made to his family. The rundown ferris wheel represents the broken childhood that his kids were forced to endure. He now realizes that its too late to make up for past mistakes because his children are all grown up now. The support beams for the ferris wheel abstractly resemble his children that the business man left behind along with their childhood. Although they are the physical support for the ferris wheel, they were the metaphorical support for their own childhood.

In order to craft my vision into a reality, I used a mixture of fine art mediums in addition to vector art in Adobe Illustrator. I first started with a basic outline for the Ferris Wheel in Illustrator and gradually started adding details. The silhouette of the businessman was done using the pen tool, the live paint tool, and the brush tool. To me, the part that ties the entire piece together is the background. To create the background, I started with a light gray background and began to layer darker shades of gray until it began taking on an ominous tone. Lastly, I added the clouds with a diluted shade of black with quick and precise strokes, and filled them in. After the watercolor dried, I scanned it digitally and placed it behind the ferris wheel in Illustrator. As a final touch, I reduced the opacity of the picture and sent it in for printing.