A Robotic Feeling: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Justin Walker (2012)

In my Illustration I aimed to show how my tendency to be a pushover and my willingness to accept favors from people can pull me and drown me under the responsibilities that come with taking on these tasks. I came up with this idea in Design class when we were given a sheet with possible words suggesting internal conflicts that would collide with external conflicts. I ended up choosing ''pushover'' and ''responsibilities'' because these concept stimulated my imagination. My idea was to have a robotic/cyborg looking man falling into an ocean. The reason why the man in the picture is a robot is because being robotic represents being a pushover; robots are built and designed to do what you ask no matter the circumstances. To reinforce this idea of obedience the robot in the illustration is also handcuffed, showing that he is helpless in what is happening to him. The blue background and the sharp stripes represents a sea of responsibilities that he is falling into; the responsibilities he has agreed to are pulling him in and drowning him with unneeded stress.

Creating this illustration was mostly a technical challenge due to my extremely limited knowledge of Illustrator. During the creation of my drawing I found Illustrator to be very frustrating and foreign because I usually use Photoshop to create all of my graphics. I also am very used to drawing on paper, without having to keep my eyes on a monitor the whole time, so drawing using the Wacom pad felt very alien to me. This made creating the image I drew on paper and recreating it in Illustrator a test of my technical skills.