The title of my piece is “Parental Guidance Discouraged,” a name that ties in with the tagline listed around the edge of the sticker: “Live for yourself, not your parents.” I was walking into school a couple of weeks ago and noticed some graffiti on a metal box outside of campus. Large handwriting scrawled onto the blue metal said, “Live for yourself, not your parents.” Underneath the statement was a smiley face with the eyes crossed out. I was struck by this exclamation and took a picture of the graffiti to remember it. It made me think about the extreme expectations placed on students in this area and how many students don’t really have any activities that they do for fun, or because they want to. So many kids around here have had their lives tailor-made by their parents in order to produce success, without room for personal enjoyment. This idea inspired me when the time came to choose a subject for our Illustrator Project, and I chose to replicate the graffiti I had seen as a sticker.
I learned a lot about Illustrator during this project. I would often encounter problems and have to figure out how to solve them on my own. For example, when the time came to map the text of my sticker around the smiley face, I had trouble figuring out the right size of the circle so that I could fit all of the words. My solution to this was to copy the smiley face and then paste it multiple times, editing each copy to be a different size and mapping the text around the different sizes until I found one that fit. I also enjoyed making a physical piece of media that I chose the colors and the design for. It was really interesting to see everyone’s plans and choices. My personal favorite design is Midori’s glasses engraving. I never would have thought of engraving one’s glasses (even though Midori’s glasses are not prescription), and I love the moon and stars design.Overall, I’m really satisfied with how my project turned out and I’m excited to use the stickers on binders, water bottles, etc.
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