Alone Together: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Kiyoshi Taylor (2013)

My illustration was based on the line from my personal essay, ''The once calm crowd transforms into savages.'' My essay is about a concert and how I become connected to the crowd and the music. The type of concert I was creating was a hard rock concert. The savages were excited people who were jumping around at the concert. The crowd I was trying to create are like wild animals being kept as house pets. You can tame a wild dog and turn it into a house pet, but if you get them excited they can turn into wild beasts, making them hard to control.

When creating my illustration I compare the crowds change in behavior to a light switch. Like the switch they can go from excited to completely calm to wild in just a second. The calm dog on the top lying in the grass represents the subdued crowd. Like I was taking in the music in my essay, the dog was taking in the nice calm atmosphere around him. The calmness of the house dog is the ‘on’ switch for controlling him. But if you flip the switch down, it becomes a predator. The calmness quickly turns violent like a storm. The predator on the bottom of the illustration represents me and the crowd when the band starts to unleash us.