It's Not Conceited to Love Yourself

An Illustration is picture that incorporates different images and colors.

As part of our self portrait unit, we were asked to create a list titled "10 Things I've Learned in My Life". We chose a personal statement and then created a media piece based on that statement. In design, we were asked to create an illustration that incorporated our symbol from our media piece. My illustration & artist statement are below.

My illustration is based off the statement “it’s not conceited to love yourself.” To me, this means one should not be apologetic about accepting and cherishing themselves. I chose a mouth to symbolize this because mouths are so versatile in art; they are often thought of as gates either to heaven or hell. I find this quite similar to the idea of loving yourself because it is such a simple concept but can, again, be the thin line between misery or euphoria. I attempted to make the inside of the mouth look a little bit like a galaxy because once you begin to love yourself, it’s almost like a new world.

Adobe Illustrator was used to make this illustration. We found images of our symbols and then used the pen tool to trace and fill them in. Translating my ideas from my head to an illustration was something I struggled with. I had initially wanted the inside of the mouth to be a nebula but that was extremely difficult to make so I settled on something nebula-esque. I layered various shapes with different colors and opacities and then feathered them to create slightly blurred edges to create this effect.