#cw1.3

[greaterthanfan]

Creative Conscience: Mental Health brief.  (Read more below.)

For the Creative Conscience awards, I was working towards showing the darker side of mental health - more often than not, mental health tends to be kept tight to the idea of someone is either anxious or depressed and there isn’t anything else. I wanted to create art that resonated and represented people with personality disorders and mood disorders, since a lot of time they aren’t seen at all in the media. 

I started by creating these pen drawings because I wanted them to be simplistic and to the point, while still having some raw emotion to them. I quickly decided I wanted to create a little more than just a black and white image, and started toying with the idea of collaging and working with newspaper as I liked the symbolism that went with it (as in, everyone is talking, but it doesn’t quite match the actual topic), so I went with a hefty job of creating an A3 piece with text pasted onto a plain background and then pen and ink ontop of it. These were all preliminary sketches and pieces leading up to my final outcome for the Creative Conscience brief. 

[greaterthanfan]

Creative Conscience: Mental Health brief. Final hand in. Ink and marker on newsprint.  (Read more below.)

For my final piece for the Creative Conscience brief, I decided I wanted to combine the ideas I had been playing with to create something that off-handedly showed the decline in mental health and how it always finds it’s way to the front. 

Reflecting on this piece, I think that it could’ve been better communicated, maybe with a written comment added as part of the piece - I feel as if the brief was very hard to respond to as it wanted people to take a positive approach to mental health, but for me mental health has always been quite a hard thing to think positively about. As someone who has been suffering with mental health, I wanted to create something that resonated with how I felt and something that would make me feel seen and good about myself and my experiences (although I think in doing this I isolate anyone who hasn’t had a firsthand experience with bad mental health, because from the outside this looks quite sinister and mean) and this really worked for me.

I think also that if I had created something else, I wouldn’t have felt as proud as I do of this. This piece is without a doubt one of the most important pieces I feel I’ve created, and really manages to get across the uneasy atmosphere I felt at the time of creating, despite the fact I think it has very positive aspects. It is one of the best pieces I think I’ve managed to create this year in terms of Illustration.

[greaterthanfan]

Creative Conscience: Mental Health brief.  (Read more below.)

Here are some of the other preliminary sketches/pen drawings I did before I decided on my definitive concept for the competition. I decided against having the faces horizontally because I felt that by having them cascading down in the same way water does has a lot more of a visible impact for a viewer, but I still wanted to keep with what I’d been doing with the newsprint and collaging.