Sinking: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Kayla Stacey (2013)

In my illustration, I chose to draw a girl drowning in water. I chose to draw this part of my essay because I feel as if this is the most self-descriptive part of my essay. I tend to always shove my feelings down and ignore them. It gets to the point where I feel like I’m drowning in my own sorrows and I can’t escape the feeling. I put the stars and moon in the picture because I view them as hopes and dreams that I keep getting further and further away from as I feel when I’m drowning. I put the light-to-dark shades of blue to show the change of the depth and to show how far I feel myself going. I wanted to change the way I view the waves, so I put them in straight lines.

After choosing pictures off the web, we brought them to Adobe Illustrator and learned how to trace the images using the pen tool. I had a hard time with it because it took a lot of patience to get the pen tool to do what I wanted. In order for me to be able to make the waves a different color, I had to make multiple layers. Making a ton of layers does help you in the long run especially if you mess up. Illustrator is a hard program to get use to because of all the tools, and it is super easy to make a mistake. You have to be very careful, but it is fun being able to express myself in such a new fun way.