Freestyle Academy proudly presents

All Grown Up: A Junior Conceptual Project by William Thabit (2015)

To create my conceptual piece, I used a variety of fine art mediums and graphic mediums. To make the sky of my piece, I used multiple shades of blue paint to watercolor a canvas. To prime the canvas, I completely covered it with three thick layers of water. Then, I painted the very top of the canvas with a strip of dark paint. Next, I painted another layer of lighter blue below the first strip. I then tipped the still very wet canvas on its side and let the colors run, making an interesting bleed effect. After that, I went to my old elementary school and took a picture of the old swing set that I had spent so much time playing on as a child. I lay down on the ground underneath the swing set to magnify the perspective of the swings and to intensify the focus of the the image. Then, I found an old picture of a teddy bear I had drawn many years ago in my childhood and scanned it. To Photoshop the water colored sky into the background, I had to manually deleted the sky in the original swing picture. This allowed me to insert the scanned watercolor painting into the sky. Then I photoshopped the scanned picture of the teddy bear, putting him sitting on the swing. The last thing I did was use Adobe Photoshop to create a table grid that looks like graph paper. I changed the color to light blue, to look like graph paper.

In my childhood I loved to paint. Watercolor was always my favorite type of painting, so I decided to use this form of painting to create an interesting sky. I let the color drip and fade down the page to make the background seem dreamy, like reminiscing on my childhood. I wanted to continue this theme of remembering my childhood, so I chose to take a picture of the old swing set I used to play on. I have many fond memories of the freedom and excitement of flying higher and higher in the air on those swings. I felt free. To continue the childhood nostalgia theme, I used Adobe Photoshop to place the picture of a teddy bear that I drew when I was younger on the swing, symbolizing me as a child. I had the bear look off into the distant sky, with graph paper. I put the paper layered on top of the watercolor to symbolize me looking into my future. Graph paper is made of many perfect squares, symbolizing structure and rules. It represents how adults must deal with responsibilities. The teddy bear, symbolizing me, looks off into the distant sky that has traces of my childhood (the watercolor sky), and shows me growing up, and having to manage responsibilities in a responsible and strict and defined manner, like graph paper.
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