Self Portrait Illustration
What is an illustration? An illustration is... an image created by an artist that is intended to explain or clarify a text. It is different from a photograph because it is not an exact picture. An illustration is drawn using pens and paints.In this illustration, I used Adobe Illustrator and the tools it includes to draw an image based off a real life photograph. My illustration is intended to help give meaning to my personal essay and poem. It also represents who I am as a person metaphorically.
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The personal essay assignment was designed to show a deeper aspect of who I am through storytelling. My story focuses on the “hunt” or quest for my desires which entails obstacles that attempt to keep me from achieving success. The symbol I chose for my illustration was a grizzly bear because it has to deal with a lot of the same things depicted in my story. Grizzly bears face many obstacles in their quest for survival. Although they are apex predators, they still face opposition from humans, which I think connects to my story really well. Even though I am very privileged to live in an area as nice and safe as Los Altos where I don’t face the same life threatening obstacles as many people my own age do in different parts of the world, I still have to overcome my own set of barriers. I chose to focus the illustration on the face of the grizzly bear because I think it shows the most emotion and detail. You can gather the most information by looking at someone’s face compared to any other part of the body. I made the teeth bright and sharp to make them stand out in the picture and emphasize the predatory nature of the beast.
Beginning the illustration was really difficult for me. I had a hard time deciding which illustration I wanted to do and which symbols I would use. Also, figuring out which kinds of pictures would actually work was a big problem for me but once I began to understand the assignment a little bit better, I was able to decide on a picture. A challenge that I think I am still dealing with is making highlights look realistic. I feel on my final illustration that the highlights around the nose look very out of place.