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Leave the Comfort Zone: A Senior PSA by Elli Lahdesmaki (2020)

My PSA is about the importance of leaving the comfort zone. I believe that taking risks and following your curiosity often requires a little bit of discomfort, but that this discomfort allows us to grow as people and can lead to amazing things. I wanted to represent this idea through the term pop the bubble. To illustrate this, I created bubbles with little people inside them to represent the entrapment of the comfort zone. I made these bubbles slightly smaller and the people inside them in grey/toned down colors to express how staying in the comfort zone and being too scared to escape it can lead to a boring, dull lifestyle. In the center of my illustration, I have a larger person with a broken bubble around them. I wanted it to stand out and seem more lively than the people trapped inside the bubbles. This is intended to represent the excitement and thrill that can come from experiencing what is outside of the comfort zone. The color scheme I used was mostly orange and purple because I think these two colors complement each other effectively and generate a nice sense of contrast.

I created my PSA using Adobe Illustrator. I heavily used the circle shape tool, pen tool, paint brush tool, and gradient effects to make my illustration come to life. I also chose to make the background black in order to make the bubbles pop out. One major struggle I had was deciding how I wanted to represent the broken bubble. It's difficult to create an illustration of a realistic broken bubble because it requires very miniscule detail that is hard to achieve using Illustrator. In the end, I decided that it would look better to make the broken bubble more illustrative and simple rather than focusing on making it extremely detailed. Since the other aspects of my illustration aren't necessarily very realistic either, I think the way I represented the broken bubble works well in my PSA. I had a fun time creating this project and I'm happy with the outcome of my final PSA illustration. Related website
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