Paranoia of Malevolence: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Caroline Caputo (2012)

For my illustration, I'm showing what something that most people would see as a pleasant surprise looks like to a paranoid person like myself. Most people look at the present and see just that, but for people like me, we see so much more. We see the intentions behind the present. The motives for the giver has and what that person is trying to accomplish through this. The blood seeping through the false layers of kindness.

In illustrator, I used the pen tool, line tool, and the rectangle tool to create the box and the ribbon wrapped around it. For the bow, I found a picture and placed it into position. I made the individual shapes with the pen tool and used various gradients to get the lighting and color. I then copied those shapes and pasted them onto a different layer below them and used the one-point perspective tool to get them at the right angle. I changed the color to purple and turned the opacity down to get them to look like shadows. I used a lot of gradients to get the shadows on the box. I used a gradient of black and grey to set an eerie atmosphere. After a lot of trial and error, I finally used the rounded rectangle tool and adjusted the angles of the handles to get them to drip. I used a gradient to get it to look like there was more blood at the bottom than at the top. To get the shine, I used the brush and the line tool.