The Bear: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Jordan Albert (2012)

In this piece, I am communicating how I push myself away from people because of my mistrust of others. Originally I was going to do this project on personal happiness derived from being myself. In the end, I chose the first idea. This was because I was sick of these depressing files I called completed projects. I wanted something that didn't just scrape my surface, but truly tell something to the viewer that they could never know. I almost instantly created the idea for the illustration, yet my original idea was to take a photograph myself and trace over that. I was glad with the end result because I don't have full trust in my photography skills. Other than this, the idea stayed the same. The biggest risk I took was using gradients and transforming objects to differ from the original photo. Nevertheless, the risks ended up helping my project. Overall, this project describes a major inner conflict I have of pushing people away for I think they may be insincere, or they will try to bring me down.

The technical aspects of this project are quite basic. There is light all shining to the focal point of the project, being the bear. Notice that the bear is also isolated from all signs of life, and people. This is to show the conflict of self-induced isolation. Originally we sketched out the project, and then obtained images. Slowly I built together a complete idea, which became the image I have now, of course after all the sketching. The room itself, especially the windows and pictures, were a pain to make, to say the least. Otherwise, objects like the bear were not overly difficult to make. In the end, using the larger windows, and gradients all with the lighter sides aimed at the focal point created more focus on the bear.