Art contest for illustrators or Fine
Artists?
For the “Make Ugly Contest”, I
needed to quickly grab the audience and show them what smoking and second hand
smoke does to the smokers and their loved ones. Following the instructions to the letter (a.k.a
brief) and carefully planning a composition (or design) is the very nature of
illustration.
Fine artists would find
this way of working very restricting but to illustrators this is exact the opposite. The illustrator, like an actor, has total freedom to create a believable character or design that interprets the idea/story. In this case I was completely free to create characters that would play the advocacy role regarding anti-smoking education.
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| Smoker's Bane. Pen and ink 2013 |
For this piece, I tried to go within and remember how smoking changed my father’s body into an
aggressive self destructive monster. Memories of several X-rays, that not only
showed how badly his lungs were affected (after 40 years of smoking) but also
how the lung cancer ate away at his liver and brains as well, motivated me to
illustrate this terrible transforming process. Reliving the pain when he left my
mother and my siblings behind gave me an idea of how this loss looks like on
paper. The fact that after 20 years we still miss him and that we are suffering
from bronchitis and asthma because of the second hand smoke helped me to express
that not only the smokers are affected, but their loved ones as well.
I feel very honored that this piece made it into the semi-finals.
The quest to find the difference will be continued.
If you entered an art competition, what skills did you use? Do you consider yourself a Fine Artist or Illustrator?
